Why Coffee Shops Spark Creativity | by Eric Weiner | Aug, 2022 | Medium

Why Coffee Shops Spark Creativity

Why Coffee Shops Spark Creativity

No, it’s not the caffeine

Photo by Sean Benesh, Unsplash.

I love coffee, but I love coffee shops even more. I cherish that sublime feeling of firing up my laptop at my favorite haunt, sipping dark roast, surrounded by fellow humans. The coffee shop is where adults engage in parallel play. Alone in the crowd I am not really alone at all.

The world’s first coffee house sprang up in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1554. From the outset, coffee was considered dangerous. It was known as the “revolutionary drink,” the stimulus of the masses. When people drank coffee, they got agitated, and who knew where that agitation might lead. Soon after Jacob’s coffeehouse opened, King Charles II issued a decree limiting their numbers. And no wonder. The whiff of democracy was in the air. Europe’s first coffeehouses were called levelers, as were the people who frequented them. Inside their walls, no one is better than anyone else.

The Viennese coffee house, in particular, was “a sort of democratic club, and anyone could join it for the price of a cheap cup of coffee,” writes Stefan Zweig in his wonderful memoir, The World of Yesterday.

What exactly did that admission price get you? Information. Lots of it. Any coffee house worthy of the name supplied the day’s newspapers, carefully mounted on long wooden poles, as they still are today. This is where you went to find out what was happening around the corner, or halfway around the world.

Most of all, the admission price got you conversation and companionship. Fellow travelers. The denizens of the coffee house were of a particular type, that strange combination of introvert and extrovert that defines most geniuses or, as Alfred Polgar puts it in his brilliant 1927 essay, “Theory of the Café Central,” “people whose hatred of their fellow human beings is as fierce as their longing for people, who want to be alone but need companionship for it.”

The coffee house is a classic example of a Third Place. Third Places, as opposed to home and office (first and second places), are informal, neutral meeting grounds. Think of the bar in Cheers, or any British pub. Other establishments — barbershops, bookstores, beer gardens, diners, general stores — can also be third places. What they have in common is that they are all sanctuaries, “temporary worlds within the ordinary world,” says Johan Huizinga, a scholar of play.

The evidence is disheartening for coffee addicts such as me. Yes, caffeine does increase alertness, but that’s not the same as creativity.

But what exactly makes a coffee house such a powerful incubator of creativity? Sometimes the most obvious explanations are the best, so perhaps what makes the secret to the coffee house is, well, the coffee.

The evidence, alas, is disheartening for coffee addicts such as me. Yes, caffeine does increase alertness, but that’s not the same as creativity; increased alertness means our attention is less diffuse, and therefore we’re less likely to make the sort of unexpected connections that are the hallmark of creative thinking. Also, caffeine disrupts both the quantity and the quality of sleep, and studies have found that people who experience deep REM sleep perform better on creative tasks than those who don’t.

No, it is not the coffee. It is the atmosphere — in particular, the sounds. When we think of the ideal place for contemplation, we tend to imagine quiet ones, a belief drilled into us by forced readings of Thoreau’s Walden and legions of shushing librarians, but quiet, it turns out, isn’t always best.

A team of researchers, led by Ravi Mehta of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, found that those exposed to moderate noise levels (seventy decibels) performed better on a creative-thinking exam than those exposed to either high levels of noise or complete silence. Moderate noise, Mehta believes, allows us to enter “a state of distracted, or diffused, focus.”

In other words, the perfect state of mind for creative breakthroughs.

This essay is adapted from my book “The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places,” published by Simon & Schuster.