If you want to improve your memory, maybe don't watch so many sexy videos. That's what a new study from the Journal of Religion and Health claims, according to The Daily Beast. "Apart from leading to dire consequences in the hereafter, the results of the study demonstrate that viewing obscene material also causes harm in this life," writes the study's author, Yakup Çetin, a foreign language education professor at Faith University in Istanbul.
To conduct the study, titled The Impact of Sexual Media on Second Language Vocabulary Retrieval, Çetin recruited 64 freshmen, ages 17 to 22, from the University of Istanbul and divided them into two groups. He seated them "in comfortable chairs" with "popcorn and juice." Both sets of students (none of whom spoke German) were shown a slideshow of 18 German words with Turkish translations. Then the control group watched a half-hour National Geographic documentary about the Amazon ("a neutral video, which lacked sexually suggestive distractions"), while the experimental group watched 18 minutes of "sexual media," including the trailer for Mr. & Mrs. Smith, a commercial for Mavi jeans, and the music video for "Hero" by Enrique Iglesias (steamy).
Afterward, both groups were given a surprise memory test to see how well they could recall the German vocab. "Subjects in the control group remembered an average of 5.53 words immediately after watching the Amazonian frogs, birds, flowers, and trees. Those who had been corrupted by the heavy necking in "Hero," on the other hand, remembered just 2.65 words on average. That difference was statistically significant," The Daily Beast explains. When Çetin tested subjects' vocabulary recall a week later, however, the difference had disappeared.
Based on these findings, Çetin suggests that, "every encounter with sexual content evokes a chain of sexual sensations and thoughts, which may delay or hinder the learning of new material." Despite his tiny sample size, strange methods, and mixed results, Çetin insists that, if we keep watching steamy music videos, both our memories and our souls are doomed.
