London: It's now established. Pretty women make men nervous, for a new study has revealed that blokes can lose their minds while talking to beautiful blondes.
Researchers in the Netherlands have found that talking to an attractive woman really could make a man lose his mind, a finding they claim may have implications for the performance of blokes who flirt with women in the workplace.
According to them, 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, 'The Daily Telegraph' reported.
Women, however, are not affected by chatting to a handsome man -- this may be simply because men are programmed by evolution to think more about mating opportunities, the study found.
In their study, the researchers recruited some 40 male students. 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.
To be specific, the study showed men who spent even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman performed less well in the tests designed to measure brain function than those who talked to someone they didn't find attractive.
But when the task was repeated with a group of female volunteers, they did not get the same results. Memory scores stayed the same, whether they had chatted to a man or a woman, they found.
"We conclude men's cognitive functioning may temporarily decline after an interaction with an attractive woman," the researchers of Radboud University wrote in the 'Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology'.