How Smoking Made People Smarter

Cigar acquired: +5 intelligence, +3 motivation,
grumpiness and weight gain debuffs removed.

A lengthy interview article, most of which I read a few days ago, is now completely lost to me: I didn’t save the URL anywhere, it’s not in my browser history, and I forget the referring page that lead me there. How does that still happen in the Age of Internet? Why blame myself if I fail at basic modern technology life skills, when I can blame the tools instead?

The interview was with two seasoned folks in the publishing or journalism industries, and they had commented that the recent reduction in smoking the last few decades is a factor in the general drop in IQ and, as a consequence, a drop in the general quality of things. Decisionmakers are living longer and this more likely to experience mental decline, whereas smoking killed them off earlier before that life stage and so prevented them from making all the processes go awry. It was a tongue-in-cheek reference, and barely part of the overall theme of the article, but there is an indirect truth communicated in this claim.

The people who “made stuff” in the past might’ve been smarter. The automated processes we have now reduce the need for super-smart people’s full participation. Midwits and dummies could participate more in the creation of things. But I don’t think this is not the main driver. The real reason was because the widespread smoking of cigarettes and cigars likely caused workflow interruptions that were more conducive to the proper workings of the human mind when engaging with complicated systems and processes. This important type of interruption was removed, and not fully replaced, when smoking fell out of favor.

This might be best explained with an historical, fictional narrative. so you’ll have to fire up the projector in your mind and run this reel-to-reel for a few moments. Picture the late 1800s or the early 1900s, and you’re a team lead working at Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park or West Orange laboratories. You come in in the morning, smoking and greeting all the other men (women don’t do this stuff) on your research team. You’re all starting on a new project, so you gather the necessary tools and materials and start hacking, soldering, bending, slicing…whatever is required for all of that. You’re all deep into the work, deep into your packs or rolled cigars, deep into worrying if this new widget will actually work when you put it together, and you notice a phenomenon that likely has been going on for some time now: managing your cigarettes is starting to affect the flow of activity. The men need to pause and rest while lifting something to grab that cigarillo dangling out their mouths. You look down and see that one of the ashes from the pack of Lucky Strikes you’ve been huffing away on has smeared onto the schematics sheet. It looks like Cuthbert’s ashes are going to drop right into the ball bearing retainer—that’s going to throw off the wear calculations.

This isn’t going to work. What to do? Well, make your men smoke when they need to, but away from all of the sensitive mechanics and flammable gases and such. No need to go outside, because indoor smoking won’t be verboten for another century or so. They can just stand away off to the side and suck the smoke sticks. Here’s where it gets interesting. If you’re working and interacting intensely with a logical system for a while, then step back and let your mind rest and (figuratively) view everything from a higher vantage point, you’ll have insights and intuitions that you don’t normally have when you’re knee deep in it. A focused mind on a single task, or maybe a few tasks, can get the job done but it doesn’t leave faculties free to see how your tasks roll up into the larger system—that is, until you take a step back.

It almost sounds like a justification for micromanaging, but it’s not quite that. Managers wouldn’t necessarily be making those dozens of miniscule mental calculations and keep track of the moving parts of a small component. That’s what the engineers do, and giving them a break to smoke and keep back from the whole thing physically, while still keeping everything and everyone in view, can spurn the perpetually-running mind’s energy, while the man’s conscious attention can be elsewhere. Like “shower thoughts” or solutions that will come to him when he’s falling asleep, a smoke break while not being completely being removed from the system can shine a light into the dark hollows of the cave and reveal some treasures. You may note that one of the electrodes happens to be too low and maybe that’s why the spark gap isn’t firing off as much as it should be, or by passing your eyes over the chalkboard, that mechanical advantage equation near the start has a small mistake that mean bigger things later on down the line.

Sure, intuited insights can still happen today. It happens when the developer waits for his code to compile and load into the browser, but sometimes even that is too efficient to allow for enough downtime. A writer working an article on a typewriter has a break if he fat-fingers a preposition and needs to stop and white it out, and when he does that, he’ll land on just the right phrasing for the analogy that eluded him earlier. But more fundamental to our example: coffee has replaced cigarettes, and there’s less of a need to step back when you have a drink involved. Maybe not less of a need, really, but the built-in concentration you need for a cigarette isn’t there with coffee. We can sip without looking and type all day with little danger, other than spilling coffee on the keyboard. We can be too free to simply go-go-go all day, unchecked and unrested.

So, it’s not really that people were smarter back then directly from nicotine, it’s just that the intelligence was brought to bear more effectively because of what smoking required people to do. Or this entire idea is nonsense and there’s a better explanation.