Men really do lose their minds while talking to an attractive woman, concludes a new studyThe study, published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, has found that attractive women actually impair the male brain.

And psychologists say this is because males are “reproductively focused”. In the study, researchers found that men who spent even a few minutes in the company of a woman they found attractive performed less well in memory tests, reports The Daily Express.

Programmed by evolution to try to pass on their genes, psychologists at Radboud University in The Netherlands said males try so hard to impress the object of their desire that they have little brain power left for other tasks.

Women, on the other hand, were not affected by chatting to handsome men, probably because they focus on more than looks, the researchers said. The findings have implications for the performance of men who flirt with women in the workplace, or even exam results in mixed-sex schools.