Study Shows Smarter People Drink More Alcohol

If after a tough week in anatomy class you tend to hit happy hour a little harder than the others, you may have some cover. Thin cover but cover nonetheless.

More intelligent children in both studies grew up to drink alcohol more frequently and in greater quantities than less intelligent children.

A National Child Development Study and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (U.K. and US respectively) show that smarter kids drink more as adults. Empirical data from both studies suggests that more intelligent people are more likely to binge drink and get drunk.

We all know Hemingway wrote drunk and edited sober. We also know that Faulkner would lock his door and drink until he blacked out. Both created masterpieces of literature.

Kant, Goethe and Luther changed the world as we know it while hitting their stammtisch at their local “kneipe.” But for every boozehound there is the outlier. Albert Einstein, whom we all can admit was a pretty instrumental and paradigm shifting brain barely drank at all.

Sartre drank like a hooligan with pills to boot. But his counterpart Camus wanted to ban alcohol as a deterrent for violent crime.

This means that the study has no real conclusion other than predicting that most people who are smarter than others tend to drink more. So go ahead big brains, order that second beer — you deserve it because you’re so smart.

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