This Is Your Brain on Sex (34 page)

Wiltgen and Derfner should take heart in the fact that researchers like Swaab, Savic, and Rahman, unlike the early neurobiological pioneers in this field, have no interest in cures or treatments for homosexuality. Swaab contends the study of neuroanatomical differences between homosexual and heterosexual brains may teach us more about how all brains develop. “It’s important to understand. By understanding, we can learn to accept it,” he told me. “I believe acceptance of both homosexuality and transsexuality is very much improved because of the studies we’ve done here in the Netherlands. That means a lot to me.”

Rahman agreed. He also suggested that the neurobiology of homosexuality may tell us something about the way brain organization has evolved over the ages. In fact he proposed that there could be a direct evolutionary benefit to having “gay” genes in the population. “People argue homosexuality is somehow thwarting evolution. That’s not how it works. Evolution is about
trade-offs between costs and benefits,” he explained. “We know homosexuality comes with a package of other traits—perhaps having a number of gay alleles in a straight population carries some distinct advantages that can be passed along. If nothing else, we can assume gay genes are good ones because they are clearly successful. They’ve been reproduced in humans for a long, long time. And they will continue to be for a long, long time to come too.”

Chapter 14

Stupid Is as Stupid Loves

You have heard it before:
Love can make you stupid. It can make you take unnecessary risks. It can make you a little bit crazy. In fact we discussed it in the previous chapters of this book. Yet while love can certainly wreak havoc with behavior, it never acts alone. It’s more of the team-player type.

The trouble seems to begin with attraction, that magnetic pull you feel toward someone long before any lasting bond has formed. Being drawn to another person, physically or otherwise, seems to have the power to cloud your decision making. Shakespeare said that love is blind, but perhaps sexual attraction is the thing that really limits our vision.

Studies that examine these kinds of effects often correlate these attraction-related deficits with hormones. Sexual attraction results in a rush of androgens and estrogens, those little chemical motivators (or, as Paul Micevych characterized them in chapter 5, gate openers). But does neuroscience support the idea that hormones make us stupid—in attraction or love?

The Little Head Thinking for the Big Head

Back in his stand-up days, Robin Williams drew uproarious applause for one line: “See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.” A plausible enough explanation for why men are often
speechless in the presence of beautiful women, this joke seemed to find support when Dutch researchers from Radboud University published a study in mid-2009 demonstrating that attractive women could derail men’s cognitive functioning. Not that most of us needed such proof. I’d wager many of us have seen the male attraction-associated stupidity in action at one time or another.

Johan C. Karremans, a member of the Department of Social and Clinical Psychology at Radboud University, starts the paper by describing the study with a fun anecdote:

Some time ago, one of the male authors was chatting with a very attractive girl he had not met before. While he was anxious to make a good impression, when she asked him where he lived, he suddenly could not remember his street address. It seemed as if his impression management concerns had temporarily absorbed most of his cognitive resources.
¹

No mention of which of the two male authors, both accomplished men with upper-level degrees, happened to have this particular failing of memory. But the point is clear: anecdotally we all seem to know that beautiful women wield some sort of influence over men’s reasoning, even those supersmart guys who should know better. That knowledge made Karremans wonder if there was something more to it than the funny thing that happened to that guy that one time back when he met a gorgeous woman.

To investigate this, Karremans recruited forty male students to complete what is called a two-back task. Here a stream of letters is presented on a computer screen, each for five hundred milliseconds, followed by a blank screen for two seconds. For each letter the study participant is asked to indicate, as quickly and accurately as possible, whether that letter is the same as the one presented two letters before it. If it matches, you press one key on the keyboard; if it does not match, you press another. A measurement of working memory, or the ability to actively keep information in your head so you can later manipulate it, the two-back is considered to be a good indicator of basic cognitive ability.

After completing a baseline measure of the task, participants were led to an adjacent room, supposedly
to pass some time as the next computer task was set up. Waiting there was either a male or a female “experimenter,” a study confederate, or fake, there to engage the study participant in neutral conversation for a few minutes. After seven minutes of conversation, participants went back to the two-back task on the computer. Once finished, the participants were then asked to rate the attractiveness of the “experimenter” and indicate if they were currently involved in a romantic relationship.

It probably comes as no surprise that an attractive female “experimenter” led to a significant decline in cognitive performance; what’s more, the more attractive the participant found the “experimenter,” the worse he did on the task. Those results stood firm whether or not the participant was currently in a romantic relationship.

In a follow-up experiment Karremans and his colleagues tested both men and women on a different cognitive task and had them interact with one another instead of a study confederate. This time around, same-sex or mixed-sex pairs were thrown together and instructed to have a five-minute conversation. Afterward the two were tested on what is known as a “modified Simon task.” This task presents words on a computer screen in the colors white, blue, or green. If the word appeared in white, participants were asked to determine whether it was a positive or a negative word by pressing a designated key. If it was in blue or green, participants were asked to ignore the word’s meaning and just determine its color, blue or green. It may sound simple, but it is actually quite a demanding task, requiring one to switch quickly between two very different tasks. After participants completed this tricky business, they were given a questionnaire asking how much they might have wanted to impress their fellow study participant as well as whether they were currently in a romantic relationship.

Once again men, regardless of relationship status, did worse on this task if they had been chatted up by a hot girl beforehand. They also admitted to being much more interested in making a good impression when paired with a female. The more they wanted to impress the girl, it seems, the worse they did on the task. No effects were seen when they were paired up with another dude.

The kicker? Women did not show the same effects. Although those who admitted
they were super keen on impressing their male cohort did perform slightly worse on the cognitive task, this result was nowhere near the correlation seen in the men. It did not take long for the results of this study to spread all over the Internet, with headlines like “Beautiful Girls Make Men Stupid”
²
and “Why Beautiful Women (Literally) Make Men Dumber.”
³
Karremans and his colleagues argued that the study participants used up so many cognitive resources trying to impress the member of the opposite sex that there simply wasn’t anything left for the task. (Note that the authors also suggested a similar study should be done with homosexual participants to see if the effect held when a gay man was interested in another man. It may not be the opposite sex that is interfering with cognition, after all, but the side effects of attraction itself.)

When the study first came out, I was still living with my ex-husband. When I mentioned the results to him in passing, he shook his head and said, “I’m pretty sure we all knew that already. I can’t believe someone bothered to study this.”

It is true that Karremans’s findings do fit quite nicely with the common mind-set; it certainly comes off as something one might put in the
duh
category. But the results of two cognitive tasks don’t exactly prove stupidity. It is possible that one might see an altered effect if a different cognitive measure was used.

There are plenty of distractions out there in the world that can get in the way of optimal cognition; one could make the argument that worries about a meeting at work or missing your lunch might also decrease performance on a cognitive task. Perhaps an attractive member of the opposite sex is not so special in that regard. Or perhaps there is something happening with hormone levels that interferes with the ability to do complex tasks.

“It’s fairly easy to argue that men, in terms of the mating game, will have different strategies and goals than women, perhaps even that they are a little bit more immediate-minded,” said Heather Rupp. At the Kinsey Institute she and Kim Wallen had demonstrated gender-specific brain activation patterns in individuals looking at erotic pictures. “But a lot depends on the kind of task you are asking people to do. Men and women have different
cognitive abilities. A raise in testosterone for a man after interacting with an attractive woman might be more detrimental to verbal-type tasks but might not affect women. But if you had a spatial task of some sort, you might see the opposite effect.”

Yet Karremans and company did not measure testosterone in these males; they did not look at penile tumescence or even ask about arousal levels. Instead their conclusions were simple: If you have only so many cognitive resources at your disposal, and you use up a bunch of them trying to impress a pretty girl, you won’t do as well on cognitive tasks. Fairly straightforward, really. But frankly, as much as we want to embrace the idea that a pretty girl has the power to make a man stupid, we still cannot answer a lot of the why’s and how’s here, including whether these results hold true across a whole battery of different cognitive tasks, across heterosexual and homosexual groups, or if they are somehow facilitated by our hormones. So although the headline “Beautiful Girls Make Men Stupid” is eminently quotable, it is not, when you look more closely at the data, exactly accurate.

Do Good Girls Like Bad Boys?

If beautiful women make men stupid, then the corollary is obvious: good girls like bad boys. Again, it feels true and is a phenomenon that, when studied, has the power to generate some seriously cutesy headlines.

As it so happens, there has been some work looking at whether women are more attracted to “masculine” men. When these studies are publicized the phrase
masculine man
often magically transforms into
bad boy
. This seems logical because these masculine men are usually rule breakers, a little rambunctious, and unimpressed by authority. They are charismatic and outgoing. They are often a little self-absorbed too. They can be the heroic type, pulling small children out of burning buildings or running across an active battlefield to save a fallen comrade. They are usually very healthy. The ladies seem to love them. And naturally they are chock-full of testosterone.
⁴

Turns out we don’t need to look over a man’s résumé or even spend all that much time with him to know whether he’s a masculine guy. We can get a pretty good idea from just
taking a good look at his face. Those same testosterone levels correlated with those high-spirited behaviors listed above also have the power to carve out a particular kind of face. “It’s all about the browridge and the jawline,” said Rupp, before going on to tell me that the Australian actor Hugh Jackman is a good example of a masculinized face. “Another good one is the actor Javier Bardem. He’s not even all that good-looking, but he’s still somehow really hot.”

I nodded my head in agreement. Javier Bardem is a great example of what screenwriters Heather Juergensen and Jennifer Westfeldt so poignantly defined as “sexy ugly” in the provocative 1990s film,
Kissing Jessica Stein
—that is, smoking hot without being traditionally cute. I certainly wouldn’t throw him out of bed for eating crackers. “But with Javier Bardem, it’s not just his face,” I said. “He’s got that accent, that deep, gravelly voice. And he carries himself with a lot of grace and confidence.”

“That’s a great point,” she responded. “But those are also testosterone-related traits. We’re talking about faces, sure, but in the real world, these testosterone-related traits go together.”

Still, faces offer us a lot of information. Time and time again, neuroscientific studies have shown that the brain loves some faces. People are very good at both recognizing and distinguishing faces, even when they are incredibly alike. And it appears that a specific area of the cortex called the fusiform gyrus helps make sense of them. It’s clear, faces are special.