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Study: Talking to Pretty Women Makes Men Stupid
Trying to impress women can take up all the male brain's power, experiment finds
By Rob Quinn
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Posted Sep 4, 09 8:20 AM CDT
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(Newser)
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Men literally lose their minds when talking to women they find attractive, a new study finds. A group of Dutch psychologists—inspired to carry out the experiment after one of them forgot his address while talking to a pretty woman—tested the memory skills of 40 heterosexual volunteers before and after they spoke to attractive women. They found the men's cognitive skills were seriously impaired after trying to impress the women, the Telegraph reports.
A similar experiment using female volunteers found that their memory skills were unaffected by talking to handsome men. The researchers believe that men, programmed by evolution, tend to use so much of their brain function when trying to impress women that little is left for anything else. "When a man meets a pretty woman, he is what we call 'reproductively focused,'" one psychologist explained. "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."