It sounds like alcohol improved their automated, instantaneous processing - or in other words, System 1 thinking. Based on what I know about alcohol, I'd guess it still slows down your System 2 thinking considerably. In fact, that could even be an explanation for the improvement in System 1 speed: their fact-checker is disabled, so they answer with their intuition right away.

There is quite a gap between improving associated word recall and "enhancing problem solving skills".

Seeing “ARM, TAR, and PEACH” written with capitals somewhat slowed me down because my brain went in acronym recognition mode.

(FWIW, I'm sober right now.)

I'm not surprised. Lots of notable writers were deep in the sauce.

Turning off the critic for a while seems like a good thing. I think that's one of my sources of akrasis - the Critic is mightier than the Creator. Gotta shut that Critic up to get anything done, or the Critic sees what's wrong before the Creator can get anyting down on paper.

That is a really weird exercise. I had to read several descriptions of the test to even figure out what people were supposed to do, and informally testing myself I had trouble getting any of the solutions.

I had some friends in college who would drink heavily before attacking programming problems.

I tried the same on a music piece I was working on one night, worked a charm. It felt very wrong morally speaking, probably due to my own prejudices, but I got the thing done and done well.

It is good for the kind of problem solving where concentrating is detrimental.

Upvoted for the excellent summary of the study.