‘You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well,’ said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the institute, who led the study…

The women and men both had the same baseline IQ scores, but more women fell into the lower performing group.

Lead authoer Kenneth Kishida added: ‘Our study highlights the unexpected and dramatic consequences even subtle social signals in group settings may have on individual cognitive functioning.