When men take risky gambles with money, they aren't just thinking about dollar signs. Turns out, they're also thinking about sex.

That's the word from a new study by researchers at Northwestern University and Stanford University who say that when a man sees erotic photographs, it lights up the same part of the brain as when he takes big financial risks.

The Associated Press reports that when the men in the study were shown the erotic photos, they were more likely to take a financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary (such as a poisonous snake) or something neutral (such as a stapler). "You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area," Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist Brian Knutson, told AP.

Specifically, the sex and money hub of the brain is the V-shaped nucleus accumbens, which is located near the base of the brain. It plays a central role in what we experience as pleasure.

The researchers found that when that hub was excited by the erotic images, the 15 heterosexual men in this study were far more likely to bet high on a random chance game that would earn them either a dollar or a dime. Each man made more than 50 gambles under brain scans, reports AP.

Knutson says the power of emotion and arousal impacts our financial decisions. "It didn't matter if the sexy woman didn't tell you anything about the odds of winning a roulette game," he explained to AP. "What really matters is that the sexy woman is having an emotional impact. That bleeds over into your financial decisions."

Sex and greed have been linked for hundreds of thousands of years. After all, for our cavemen ancestors to attract a woman, they also had to be a provider.

The study findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal NeuroReport.

--From the Editors at Netscape