Something women already know: The mere thought of a woman can impair a man’s cognitive abilities
New research suggests the mere idea of an encounter with a woman can impair men’s cognitive performance.
Something women already know: new research from the Netherlands suggests that the mere thought of a woman can impair a man’s cognitive abilities.
Ladies: Do you have any idea how much power you have over us men? To quote the classic song, it seems the very thought of you is enough to dull our brains.
That’s the conclusion of a research team from the Netherlands, which reports the mere anticipation of interacting with a woman can temporarily impede men’s mental abilities.
In one experiment, “Casually mentioning a female instead of a male name was sufficient to impair men’s cognitive performance,” the team from the Radboud University Nijmegen Behavioral Sciences Institute writes in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. In another, a brief instant-messaging exchange was enough to do the trick.
“Moreover, these effects occur even if men do not get information about the woman’s attractiveness,” adds the researchers, led by Sanne Nauts.
The research builds on a much-discussed 2009 study by Johan Karremans (one of the authors of the new paper). It found men’s, but not women’s, cognitive performance declined following five to seven minutes of socializing with an attractive stranger. That study concluded that heterosexual males are, in such situations, “expending their cognitive resources … on making a good impression.”
Any man who has found himself at a loss for words while chatting with an attractive woman can validate that conclusion. The new study finds this mental-depletion dynamic can be triggered by the simple idea of such an encounter — even when a man has no clue regarding a woman’s attractiveness or availability.
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