The research shows that after a man spends time with an attractive woman he performs less well in tests designed to measure brain function than when he chats with those he doesn’t find attractive. Do genes have something to do with this? Well, we’re already aware that even the smartest guy can get dumb and tongue-twisted when talking to an attractive woman, but what’s the scientific explanation for this?

Psychologists at Radboud University in The Netherlands carried out the study after one of them got so stuck at trying to impress the attractive woman he was talking to that he forgot his own address after the woman asked him where he lived.

To see if other men are affected the same way, they recruited 40 male heterosexuals students. First, the volunteers took a standard memory test where they have to observe a stream of letters, and say as fast as possible, if each one was the same as the one before last. After the test, the volunteers then spent seven minutes chatting with the male and female members of the research team before taking the test again.

The results showed men are slower and less accurate after trying to impress the women they were talking to. The more they fancied them, the worse their score.

When the task was repeated by female volunteers, the results were different. Memory scores stayed the same , whether they chatted to a man or a woman.

The researchers concluded that men’s cognitive functioning may temporarily decline after an interaction with attractive women. One psychologist said when a man meets a pretty woman, he is what we call ‘reproductively focused’. A woman on the other hand, looks for signs of other attributes like wealth, youth and kindness.