I recently had a few interesting conversations with some good friends about celebrity crushes. I told them I rarely ever had a celebrity crush, and a couple of the ones I did have, I ended up meeting them and they quickly lost all of their appeal to me. One of them asked me which celebrity I find the most appealing right now, and without hesitation I said, Amy Schumer.

Several (but not all) of my friends laughed and assumed I was joking; I wasn’t. So I decided to do a search of the hottest female celebrities and I didn’t find Amy listed on any of the lists. I did find a lot of the regular names like Scarlett Johansson, Beyonce, Jessica Alba, Megan Fox, and Kate Upton, etc.

So then I refined my search to look for the hottest females on television. Again no listing of Amy Schumer, and some lists went all the way to the top 100. I was appalled but not surprised. The names I found most frequently on the television lists were: Emily Van Camp, Nina Dobrev, Kerry Washington and Kaley Cuoco who are all arguably attractive, but hardly Amy Schumer attractive IMHO.

If you made it this far you are probably wondering what any 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 how to train your brain to do what you want it to do, rather than simply using its default mechanisms. Your brain is remarkable but also quite lazy and egotistical at the same time.

Most people leave their brains alone, and without realizing it, let their brains control them. They think, and will stridently argue, that they are in control of all of their decisions, but behind the scenes (at a subconscious level) most decisions are made by your brain before you are aware a decision even needs to be made. As a result, we quite often use the wrong part of our brain to make our decisions, which can lead to trouble or under performance.

In dealing with hotness or attractiveness, which is based on lust, we use the brains hypothalamus. We often confuse lustful feelings with feelings of true love, which is experienced in another region of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (VTA). It takes effort to create habits that supersede these default mechanisms and learn to be able to distinguish between these two similar but different emotions.

I think most men have a hard time looking beyond lustful feelings when forming a first impression of a woman. This is one of men’s brains’ default mechanisms. Interestingly, if you look at lists of hottest or most attractive male celebrities, you will quite often see names like Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and Bruno Mars right along with Brad Pitt, Chris Hemsworth and Channing Tatum.

So why isn’t Amy Schumer on any of the lists I found? Maybe women’s brains are more evolved in this area than men’s are? We know women are better at multi-tasking than men, so perhaps this is an off-shoot of that where they can distinguish between, lust, love and attachment (which is in the ventral pallidum of your brain) better than men can? I don’t know the answers to these questions. What I do know is that most people let their brains get in the way of their happiness, performance, and seeing all of the beauty around them. As Shakespeare said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” It would be nice if more people realized they have the power to control their brain rather than needlessly letting it control them.

If you simply showed me a picture of Amy Schumer I probably would not find her exceptionally attractive. But who has a relationship with a picture? What I see when I look at Amy Schumer is a total package. In a photo she may not be a 10, but as a woman/person I see a 9-plus. She’s smart, funny and ‘real’ and those qualities bring out her looks. As Judge Judy says, “Beauty fades, but dumb is forever.”

You can follow Sam on Twitter @SuperTaoInc

Posted in The Mind Side Blog