Um, 2, 8, er ... gee ... she's pretty. After a psychologist at Radboud University in The Netherlands forgot his address while trying to impress a beautiful woman, his research team decided to conduct a study with 40 heterosexual male students to see if women really can make men lose their minds. The men were given a memory test in which they had to quickly indicate whether the letter or number shown was the same as the previous one they were shown. Next, they had to talk to a man or a woman for seven minutes before taking the memory test again. The male students who spoke with an attractive woman performed significantly poorer, experiencing slower reaction times and lower memory scores.
The psychologists concluded that when trying to impress a female, a man uses all of his cognitive resources, or brain functions, so that no resources are available for recalling certain information, such as where he lives. The more each male participant was attracted to the woman and wanted to impress her, the worse he performed, posing possible implications for the workplace or exams in co-ed schools. Researchers repeated the study with women but found that no matter who they talked to, women performed the same before and after the seven-minute conversation. George Fieldman, psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society, speculated that this happens because men are genetically programmed to think about passing on their genes and are "reproductively focused" when an attractive woman is nearby. Women, on the other hand, analyze a man's wealth, youth and other evolutionarily desirable traits when meeting for the first time, making them less likely to sacrifice their brain functions to focus on a man's physical attractiveness.
-compiled by Lani Hossain
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