MUMBAI: Let's talk about sex! The BBC is all set to unveil sex secrets in the UK. Almost half a million people in the UK have logged onto BBC's site to take part in a survey testing men and women's personality traits, cognitive abilities, sexual attitudes and behaviour and mate preferences. these will take centrestage in a new series The Secrets of the Sexes which kicks off next week on BBC One.

In the part of the survey designed to measure attitudes to sex and love, 47 per cent of men indicated that they would need to feel some form of attachment before sex, compared to 69 per cent of women; whilst 24 per cent of women said they did not need to feel attachment before sex, compared to 45 per cent of men. Men appear to be more romantic than women, with 67 per cent saying they believe in love at first sight, compared to 64 per cent of women.

Men are also more 'sexually optimistic' - when asked how many sexual partners they believed they would have in the next five years men believed they would have almost double the number that women anticipated (3.4 to 1.9). The survey also revealed that high earners of both genders have a higher sex drive but only the high earning men actually have more sex. Men and women participating ranked 23 traits for attractiveness; men's top five in order were: intelligence, overall looks, humour, honesty and facial attractiveness; women's were humour, honesty, intelligence, kindness and values.   
            
In cognitive tests in the survey men who took part consistently performed better than women in tests designed to measure visuo-spatial awareness, whilst women participating performed better at tests designed to measure verbal fluency and object location. Just over a fifth of men participating (21 per cent) appeared to have 'female' brains i.e. better than the average woman at 'female' tasks, and vice versa for women (21 per cent). Results from the BBC survey have been analysed by academic researchers and will be published in British scientific journals.