There's a fun "name that tune" game on Apple Arcade that my wife and I often play on the weekends called SongPop Party. We often play for fun on Friday or Saturday nights and, usually, after imbibing a few glasses of wine or two (or three...). It's a sort of "name that tune" type of game that drops you into an "arena" where musical gladiators square off against one another and the fastest times (if correct) win. (You can also put it in party mode and play only against people you know).
In some categories, in the arena, we are now in the top 150 out of more than 60,000 players listed, so, apparently, we are pretty good at this and, also, obviously, we need to get a life. Needless to say, when we play this game, we're usually a bit buzzed. But, here's where things get kind of interesting: When we play this game late in the evening, if you'll pardon my bravado for a moment, we are unbeatable (Well, maybe "unbeatable" is a stretch, and I am excepting ridiculous categories for naming tunes like classical or improvisational jazz).
When we reach the proper state after the right amount of wine, I feel like the gods of wine, music and play all converge upon me to guide my hands instantly to the correct answers. I actually, at that point, don't even thinkabout the correct answers, I just knowthem or, more correctly, my hand knows them. Some songs I even get correct from the amount of silence at the beginning.
Occasionally, however, we play the game earlier in the evening, beforewe're yet buzzed. And on those occasions, while we perform decently, the gods of wine seem to abandon us. On those occasions, I feel like my mind is working quickly, but there's usually someone faster. (The winner of these matches is usually someone in Europe who is several hours later into their evening, and I conjecture, a few glasses ahead of us.)
Here's my theory about what's going on: When I'm notbuzzed, my mind knows the right answer, but then it pauses for a split second to "think" about it, to be sure, and then "approves" the answer. But when I'm buzzed, the "approval" part my mind is no longer delaying things for that split second. My consciousnesssimply knowsthe right answer and then, with no filter, my hand moves to the correct one.
There is a downside when buzzed - sometimes there is a song that is a bit of a fake out - or that I don't know quite as well - and, for those, my hand will move faster than my mind catches on, but, on balance, going with my gut and letting my hand just consciously move to the answer without my mind second guessing it has gotten us in the top .25% of players of all time in this game.
Now, for a while, I thought this was just a funny quirk of our weekend activities, but, it turns out, as I learned from a recent essay by Thomas J. Bevan, there is a term for this phenomenon, and it has been studied. The study stated that performance is best, in certain games, when the participant has reached their Optimal Altered State (OAS).
From Thomas' essay:
