According to a recent study, people who are craving sex do better on critical thinking exercises than those who aren’t. Jens Forsters, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam, administered the tests to groups of people who were thinking about sex, and groups who weren’t. Those in the first group universally scored higher.

And, getting sex is even more effective than just thinking about it. In a different study in Germany, researchers studied the brain activities of college students who were having sex on a regular basis, and those who were not. Those who were getting it on the regular showed greater brain activity. The researcher said, “Sex makes you more intelligent in that experiences are collected that can be used later on in areas of your life not linked to sex.”

In some rare cases, however, vigorous sex can cause temporary total amnesia. A 54-year-old woman in Washington DC went to the hospital in 2011 because she was unable to remember anything that had happened in the past 24 hours. She knew who she was, but she was unable to form new memories. She told doctors that the trouble started just after having sex with her husband. Her memory eventually returned, and there was no permanent damage. The weird part is that it’s happened to other people: about 3 to 5 people per 100,000 will experience some sort of transient global amnesia. No one knows the exact cause, although sex is implicated in a number of cases. It goes away after a while, and has never been documented in the same person twice.