Breaking news! Men become less intelligent when they're trying to impress women they'd like to sleep with! A new study in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology found that "men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function" than men who talked to women they didn't want to, er, mate with. The Telegraphreports that the study, which consisted of 40 male heterosexual students, proceeded as follows:
Each one performed a standard memory test where they had to observe a stream of letters and say, as fast as possible, if each one was the same as the one before last. The volunteers then spent seven minutes chatting to male or female members of the research team before repeating the test. The results showed men were slower and less accurate after trying to impress the women. The more they fancied them, the worse their score.
And how did the other sex fare? When the test was repeated with a group of female volunteers, their memory scores stayed the same regardless of whether they'd chatted with a man or a woman. The researchers even managed to come up with a somewhat scientific theory for why this occurred:
Researchers who carried out the study...think the reason may be that men use up so much of their brain function or "cognitive resources" trying to impress beautiful women, they have little left for other tasks.
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