An article in the year-end issue of The Economist talks about something most of us already knew, but which science has just confirmed: a glimpse of a beautiful woman can change the way a man thinks- specifically, change him to lose his fiscal prudence and become more spendthrift.

Two researches at McMaster University performed tests evaluating how steeply people discounted the future, i.e., whether they would want a smaller sum of money now or a greater sum of money in the future. They did this before and after showing men and women different sets of pictures of attractive women or men, non-attractive women or men, beautiful cars and unimpressive cars.

... As predicted, men who had seen pictures of pretty women discounted the future more steeply than they had done before—in other words, they were more likely to take the lesser sum tomorrow. As Dr Wilson puts it, it was as though a special “I-want-that-now” pathway had been activated in their brains. After all, the money might come in handy immediately. ...

Dr Wilson and Dr Daly speculate that the simple act of regarding beautiful women is able to engage and manipulate the male brain's reward centres. This idea is supported by earlier brain-scanning studies which showed that looking at beautiful women, but not plain ones, arouses a man's nucleus acumbens, the part of the brain that evaluates rewards. That structure, in turn, is tightly linked to the orbitofrontal cortex, which has been shown to be activated by monetary rewards. So, ladies, it looks as though you were right. Men are just as gullible as you thought they were.

While this should have been obvious before, I now have a greater insight into my own behaviour- particularly, how I managed to blow so much money on women who aren't worth it. I shall have to be careful reaching for my wallet in the future! Not as much as one of my friends, though, who as I recall blew a couple of hundred bucks on a fantastically beautiful woman on their first date (she later became his girlfriend, and then two and a half years later broke his heart). Let this be a lesson to all of us.