I recently had some interesting conversations with some good friends about celebrity crushes. I told them that I had rarely fallen in love with a celebrity, and I ended up meeting a couple of those who I did know and they quickly lost all their appeal to me. One of them asked me which celebrity I find the most attractive right now, and without hesitation I said, Amy Schumer.
Several (but not all) of my friends laughed and assumed I was joking; I was not. So I decided to do a search for the hottest female celebrities and I didn’t find Amy on any of the lists. I found many of the usual names like Scarlett Johansson, Beyonce, Jessica Alba, Megan Fox and Kate Upton etc.
So, I refined my search to find the hottest women on TV. Again, Amy Schumer was not included on the list, and some lists made the top 100. I was shocked but not surprised. The names I found most frequently on the television charts were: Emily Van Camp, Nina Dobrev, Kerry Washington, and Kaley Cuoco, who are all possibly attractive, but Amy Schumer hardly attractive IMHO.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably wondering what all of this has to do with brain function or peak performance. It may surprise many of you that it has a lot to do with it. One of the key facets of peak performance is learning to train your brain to do what you want it to do, rather than simply using its default mechanisms. Your brain is extraordinary but also quite lazy and selfish at the same time.
Most people leave their brains alone and inadvertently let their brains control them. They think, and will argue stridently, that they are in control of all their decisions, but behind the scenes (at a subconscious level) most decisions are made by your brain before you realize that a decision needs to be made. As a result, we often use the wrong part of our brain to make our decisions, which can lead to problems or poor performance.
When dealing with heat or attractiveness, which is based on lust, we use the hypothalamus of the brain. We often mistake lustful feelings for feelings of true love, which are experienced in another region of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (VTA). It takes an effort to create habits that override these predetermined mechanisms and to learn to be able to distinguish between these two similar but different emotions.
I think most men have a hard time looking past lustful feelings when making a first impression of a woman. This is one of the default mechanisms of the brain of men. Interestingly, if you look at the lists of the hottest or hottest male celebrities, you will often see names like Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bruno Mars along with Brad Pitt, Chris Hemsworth, and Channing Tatum.
So why is Amy Schumer not on any of the lists I found? Perhaps the brains of women are more evolved in this area than those of men? We know that women are better at multitasking than men, so maybe this is a consequence of that where they can distinguish between lust, love and attachment (which is in the pale ventral of their brain) better than the men. I do not know the answers to these questions. What I do know is that most people let their brains get in the way of happiness, performance, and seeing all the beauty around them. As Shakespeare said, “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it that way.” It would be nice if more people realized that they have the power to control their brain rather than letting it control them unnecessarily.
If you just showed me a photo of Amy Schumer, I probably wouldn’t find her exceptionally attractive. But who is related to an image? What I see when I look at Amy Schumer is a total package. In a photo it may not be a 10, but as a woman / person I see a 9 or more. She is smart, funny and “real” and those qualities highlight her appearance. As Judge Judy says, “beauty fades, but foolishness is forever.”
You can follow Sam on Twitter @SuperTaoInc