No wonder he was smiling.
The Japanese have a word, ‘Kenjataimu‘. It translates roughly as ‘sage time’ and describes our clarity of thought immediately after satisfying the evolutionary need for action between the sheets.
A period when our genitals take five and your brain is free to have ideas that aren’t new chat up lines or adventurous uses for whipped cream. Good ideas. Big, life changing ideas.
This was my instant theory when I heard a study had shown more sexually active countries tend to have the most Nobel Prize winners. Either that or they’re handing out Nobel Prizes for shagging now.
Researchers who carried out the work have a slightly different take however. Their suggestion is that genuine, world altering eureka moments need more than a massive I.Q; they take pretty high testosterone levels too.
The study published in in the Journal of Creative Behavior in May 2018 compared several countries’ data in two main areas. Firstly the strength of their scientific output in the shape of;
This was then compared to seven general indicators of a nation’s testosterone levels.
These included; body hair, the length of the CAG repeat on the androgen receptor gene, prostate cancer incidence, male and female 2D:4D finger ratio, and sex frequency and number of partners.
CAG trinucleotide repeat is located in the AR gene and varies in length. The shorter the length the stronger the androgen output and sensitivity to sex hormones like T. The 2D:4D finger ratio is the belief that if you ring finger, or 4th digit is longer than your index finger or 2nd digit, the higher volume of male hormone you were exposed to in the womb.
Sure enough, generally speaking the higher markers of T and frequent nookie per capita in a country, paired with higher production of major scientific works and Nobel laureates.
That’s places like Sweden, Germany, Luxenbourg the U.K, France & Cyprus, for example.
Compare these places to populations who are traditionally very academically gifted, but a bit more all work, no play, like China or Japan where the instances of winning science’s top prize drops away off.
It’s worth saying though it’s not the case that just any horn dog can hump his way into the scientific history books. Considerable I.Q is needed too.
For that we’ll look to Professor Edward Dutton of the University of Oulu in Finland, who helped author the study, for his proper, professional, scientific opinion.
Right. Well, thanks for that, Patch Adams. Do you think we could have a grown up answer now?
Well that makes sense. But is the higher sex drive really all high T gives these great minds?
Dutton’s quip about balls, and the fact we’re talking about the male hormone might make it sound like scientific discovery is a boy’s club. But that’s not the case at all. Women can have high T too.
Not enough to rival Einstein’s moustache, but enough to potentially help spark ideas that gave him a run for his intellectual money.
Just ask Nobel past winners Maria Goeppert Mayer, Marie Curie, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, May-Britt Moser, Youyou Tu and many more. Remember too there’s that saying about men having great ideas during sex because they’re plugged into a genius.
Look it’s not lost on us that this is a study by scientists about how much sex scientists are having. The whole think could be an eloborate “Yeah! We do it LOADS! Take THAT high school reunion!”
That said, a lot of the traits higher testosterone gives you, namely confidence, drive and ambition, would probably give you an edge in any field. Pair plenty of testosterone with a gigantic brain and it stands to reason special things are probably going to happen.
Besides Albert Einstein was married twice and had countless affairs. There’s even a rumour he hooked up with Marilyn Monroe for god sake. Plus Marie & Pierre Curie were married when they did their most famous work. Chances are at least some days they left the lab with a special glow that wasn’t just radiation, if you catch my drift.
So maybe when Issac Newton said Newton said ‘Every action has an equal an opposite reaction’ he meant that kind of action. You’ve got to wonder where he got the the idea for balls thwacking off each other. Maybe he was putting that law of perpetual motion to seriously good use. Sly dog. It’s always the quiet ones, eh?