Beautiful women make men's brains go haywire: Study

The study establishes that while trying to impress a beautiful woman, men use so much of their brain that their mind gets temporarily impaired to perform any other task.

This is the reason if men are given memory tests designed to measure brain functions in the presence of an attractive female, they are likely to perform bad.

Researchers at the Radboud University in The Netherlands conducted this study after one of them had an encounter with an attractive woman whom he was so keen to impress that he “temporarily absorbed most of his cognitive resources”.

Research methodology
The researchers included 40 male heterosexual students in research. Each one of them had to perform a standard memory test. After completing the test, the volunteers had to spend at least seven minutes chatting to male or female members of the research team.

Then the male volunteers were made to repeat the memory test. The results showed that spending even a few minutes in the company of attractive women marred the performance of the male volunteers in the second memory test. Their scored lowered as their answers were less accurate.

On the flipside, when the female volunteers were made to repeat the task, they scored better, irrespective of the fact that they had chatted to a man or a woman between the tests.

Findings of the study
The study concluded that if a man finds a woman attractive and spends even few minutes in her company, his cognitive functioning will tend to decline temporarily.

It is because, psychologists say, the males are programmed by evolution to think about the ways to pass on their genes, so whenever they encounter an attractive woman they only think about mating opportunities.

On the contrary, if a woman finds a man attractive, she considers other aspects too like wealth, youth, kindness, confidence, honesty etc. than mere looks.

Psychologist Dr George Fieldman, a member of the British Psychological Society, said, “When a man meets a pretty woman, he is what we call 'reproductively focused'. But a woman also looks for signs of other attributes, such as wealth, youth and kindness. Just the look of the man would be unlikely to have the same effect.”

The study is published in the recent issue of Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology.