This article was originally published in Le Point on 27.07.2025
Imagine you’re in front of your computer and a giant timer pops up on the screen. In a moment, you’re told, you’ll see a word—the name of some common household object. Your job is simply to come up with as many possible uses for that random thing that you can think of. The trick is the time crunch: you’ve only got five minutes to generate this “alternate uses” list. Ready? Okay, your word is…. towel. Go!
Now, if you’re like most people, you’ll quickly come up with a handful of decently clever applications, say, a door-draft stopper, a floor mat, a makeshift turban, and so on. However, if you happen to be ovulating—yes, you read that correctly—when given this standard test of divergent thinking, your answers are probably going to be much more interesting. Rather than such banal examples as those above, you might come up with, I don’t know, an objet trouvé to display as a tapestry in a contemporary art exhibition, an ‘invisibility cloak’ for use in a children’s imaginary play session, or a braided and repurposed tug-of-war dog toy.
At least, those are the types of more original items I imagine some intelligent egg-bearer out there might conjure up on the days she’s most likely to conceive. This admittedly odd statement is, believe it or not, empirically based, and comes from a recent study in Frontiers in Psychology by Polish psychologists Katarzyna Galasinska and Aleksandra Szymkow. Drawing from a wide array of evidence showing that women’s mating-related preferences and behaviors are influenced by their “time of the month,” the authors predicted that cognitive fluctuations should also appear as measurable changes over the menstrual cycle.
Before we get into that, here’s a quick summary of what we already know from those previous studies. (I hesitate to point out the obvious, but these are only aggregate patterns in human females covering large datasets and certainly not reflective of all women.) Women tend to wear more revealing and fashionable clothes when they’re ovulating, spend more money on cosmetic products, are more likely to attend social gatherings (presumably to meet men), and are more prone to taking risks, being more likely, for example, to accept invitations from male strangers to dance with them in nightclubs. Speaking of dancing, one intriguing study showed that women at peak fertility displayed more innovative bodily movements, which may or may not be related to those infamous stripper studies showing that lap dancers make better tips when they’re ovulating. Not surprisingly, they’re also more sexually aroused.
Physiologically, too, meaningful alterations occur whenever this relatively brief window for reproducing is open. Women’s voices increase in pitch as they near ovulation, aligning with men’s preferences for femininity. Their scent also changes. Male participants who are otherwise clueless about the provenance of sample body odors judge the natural fragrance of an ovulating female as more pleasant, even when compared to those from the same woman at different cycle stages.
Back to Galasinska and Szymkow’s study showing boosts in women’s divergent thinking during the ovulatory phase, what motivated their investigation was the idea that female creativity is, well, sexy. Or at least, being well-endowed in the imagination organ promotes alluring displays of artistry in women, and these signals not only capture men’s attention but also communicate to other women that they’re formidable romantic rivals. This “signaling theory” about the adaptive role of female creativity was perhaps best laid out by the evolutionary psychologist Marco Antônio Corrêa Varella and his coauthors about a decade ago. Yes, they note pre-emptively, there are disproportionately more “great masters” than “great mistresses” in the history of art, literature, music, and so on, but most scholars believe this tilted ratio has more to do with testosterone-fueled sociocultural factors, and perhaps differences in the more peacock-like motives of men, than it does the aesthetic aptitudes of women. Moreover, we’re not just talking about masterpieces here. In fact, after reviewing a huge range of data from developmental, cross-cultural, personality, cognitive, and anthropological studies, Varella and his colleagues showed that it’s clearly the fairer sex that is the overall winner in the creative arts domain.
It’s not just female’s greater interest in their own appearance and in fashion, or their preference for fiction over nonfiction, studying the humanities over STEM subjects, or attraction to choreographed sports such as gymnastics and ice-skating over football and rugby. Such things could, in principle, be explained by cultural forces. Still, boiling it down to the most basic neurocognitive facts, it is the females of our species who seem almost preternaturally equipped to detect beauty in this world. Compared to boys and men, girls and women show: greater auditory acuity; higher pitch discrimination and pure tone detection; higher tactile sensitivity; higher sensitivity to tastes and odors; better fine motor skills; greater odor discrimination and identification; faster and more accurate ability to distinguish between subtle color differences; higher susceptibility to emotional contagion in social gatherings; more facial expressions in response to emotion-provoking stimuli; better dream recall and more interest in dreams; higher frequency of fantasizing; and more time spent looking at faces of adult humans than at inanimate objects.
Like any sex differences, those involving aesthetic sensibilities are more continuous than categorical—and none of these traits necessarily translate to actual art production. Still, these innate differentials would certainly help to set the stage for creative flourishing in females. Their nudging effects might even be reflected in some of the earliest examples of symbolic imagery from prehistory. This astonishing fact refers to the recent discovery that the preponderance of ancient cave art was apparently made by women. Upon analyzing 32 well-preserved hand stencils from Upper Paleolithic (35,000-15,000 years ago) cave sites in France and Spain, one prominent archaeologist found that the prints were salient enough to confidently determine sexually dimorphic hand features. He concluded that 75 percent of them were made by girls and women.
Cave art, including hand stencil at top. Credit: Dean Snow
The operating word in this evolutionary narrative is “art,” a notoriously slippery category that eludes even the best philosophers. But for semantic purposes it covers everything from basketweaving to poetry to decoration to singing to contortionism—and pretty much all that glitters, whistles, and shimmies in between. Whether Michelangelo’s David or just your chatty neighbor’s kitsch, art is, in this Darwinian sense, art. “The core of all artistic manifestation,” the authors argue, “may be seen as a multimodal communication through enhancement activities that require physical, material, creative, and appreciative effort to produce extraordinary behaviors and/or products that attract attention, inspire aesthetic evaluations, and induce emotional reaction in others.” Can art exist in the absence of an audience, or at least, an intended audience? In these pragmatic terms, the answer is a resounding no. Like any other form of communication, it takes two to tango (which, incidentally, is considered an art form). “The artistic domain is a field dominated by females,” reason Varella and his colleagues, “at least partly because of their underlying tendency to compete for a better aesthetic appearance (i.e., bodily attractiveness including self-grooming or self-ornamentation), behavioral performance (i.e., singing, dancing, acting), and the final product (i.e., handcrafts, visual and plastic arts).”
Don’t forget that weird talent competition part of the Miss America pageants, which accounts for almost half of a contestant’s total score. When I lived in Northern Ireland, I recall the lads in Belfast referring to pretty women as the “local talent.”
The point is, women tend to use their art to compete for the most desirable males and as a deterrent against female rivals. Rather than violently bashing each other’s heads in, as men are inclined to do, women’s craftier style of intrasexual competition is more about makeup, beads, and trinkets—“ornaments as armaments,” as the authors put it. Women gossiping about other women’s clothes, hairstyles, or home décor would presumably fall under this heading too, as would copying the aesthetics of Kardashian-like figures, who are observed to successfully seize the attention of desirable males.
So, when those Polish researchers decided to look into whether women display more original ideas when ovulating, they used the divergent thinking task. It’s not that a woman’s wily skills in coming up with some ingenuous use for a towel or shoe on the fly gets men hot and bothered (usually), but the researchers used the task as a standard cognitive measure of creative potential. If, for any given woman, ideas for those everyday objects are the most fluent and original when she’s releasing an egg, this would also apply to whatever expression of arts and aesthetics that she puts that boosted creative mind to during this fertile period.
To test their primary hypothesis of cyclic changes in divergent thinking, Galasinska and Szymkow wrangled up 72 reproductive-aged women, all of whom were cycling naturally (none were pregnant, breastfeeding, using hormonal contraceptives, or had given birth for at least three months prior) and who agreed to take saliva and urine tests over their natural cycle. This enabled the researchers to ascertain which stage the participant was in as each fought the clock to generate as many alternate uses as possible for that previously mentioned towel. In other words, each woman was tested a total of three times, once during the follicular stage (egg on its way), once during the ovulatory stage (egg officially released), and once during the luteal phase (the rest of the month). In experimental parlance, this is known as a within-subjects design, which means that every participant is assigned to all levels of the key variable. (As opposed to a between-subjects design, in which participants are randomly assigned to just one level.) In this case, that key “variable” was cycle stage; women’s results on the task weren’t being compared to those of other women who were at the same stage, but to their own performance when they were at different stages of their cycle.
A third of the women began the study at the follicular phase, a third at the ovulatory stage, and a third at the luteal stage, but they all signed up for the “month-long” study (actually, cycles ranged from 21 to 35 days) and completed the same procedure at each time point. All women saw “towel” or “shoe” or “bottle” for their object words once each, in a random order. And it wasn’t just divergent thinking being measured. Galasinska and Szymkow collected other relevant data too at each phase, for example women’s self-reported mood, arousal level, cognitive inhibition, and another intelligence task. This way they were able to rule out the possibility that improvements in divergent thinking during ovulation were simply a side effect of heightened mood or arousal, or some other artifact.
Now, I don’t want to oversell the results here. When a group of four judges were asked to blindly rate the women’s alternate-use lists on the dimensions of fluency (number of ideas generated), flexibility (variety of responses), and originality (novelty and uniqueness), it was only originality that saw the predicted creative gains during ovulation. According to Galasinska and Szymkow, though, that’s the dimension that really matters. “As the most captivating feature of creativity,” the authors write, “originality is also found to be the strongest predictor of it. . . . [T]he probability to generate an original idea increases with the number of ideas. However, the number of ideas is not essential, as a creative person may produce only one idea, but it may be an original one.”
In fact, across the whole sample, women produced an impressive eleven ideas on average at each phase. For the most part, those ideas weren’t anything to write home about. “Women had a similar quantity, but different quality of ideas [across the cycle],” write the authors. Even then, the significantly more original ideas during the fertile period should be taken with a grain of salt. That’s “significant” in the statistical sense only; what that “enhanced originality of ideas” looked like in reality was a judged score of 2.3 versus 2.1 (with 1 being “not original” and 5 being “highly original”). Still, that relatively modest effect might be enough, according to the authors, to give women a time-sensitive opportunity to use their own maximum creativity to impress and entice men, potentially leading to conception.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an old shoe to upcycle.
Like what you read? Toss a tip in the jar—any amount that makes sense for you—so I can keep overthinking things on your behalf.