Summer is studded with the great sporting events of Wimbledon, Lord’s and Henley. This year the flannelled fools and muddied oafs celebrated by Kipling have also played football in temperatures reaching the nineties.

The aesthetes and academics have vastly different pleasures in summer. This week they could have gazed at Modigliani, or the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, or visited the Rebels & Martyrs show at the National Gallery. Those with a more creative bent might also have attended gatherings at any number of West End art galleries. The Saharan heat did little to dampen the spirits of these revellers, who continued to laugh and flirt long after the sun had disappeared.

Two recent reports on human nature were all too evidently accurate in their conclusions. It did appear that people whose interests were creative rather than sporting, even if they were not the proud possessors of well-honed, muscled bodies, were every bit as randy and successful with the opposite sex as athletes. What the aesthetes lacked physically was evidently compensated for by a creative imagination.

Their behaviour seemed to confirm the findings of both reports. A piece of research reported this week denied the suggestion in the old song that libido flags when it is Too Darn Hot. It showed that people were more sexually active in hot, rather than cold, weather. The other research was that of Dr Daniel Nettle, of the University of Newcastle. Six months ago he published his findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. This psychologist has added statistics to prove the common observation that professional artists and writers have an uncanny knack of seducing the most desirable men and women. Dr Nettle found that there was a close association between the number of sexual partners someone had had, even if their liaisons had lasted not more than a night or two, and their level of creativity.

Well-educated, successful professional people whose success rests on their ability as artists, reviewers or writers, typical of the Cork Street aficionados, had between two and three times the number of sexual partners as did people of similar intellectual ability but in professions that were more prosaic.

Dr Nettle favoured the opinion that the sex appeal of the creative was in part because the possession of a lively creative mind is considered an attractive feature in either sex. These lucky people started with the advantage of being considered attractive before they had begun their chat-up line. Even being in a regular relationship doesn’t stop their tally rising, for they are usually forgiven any infidelity as this is expected of a creative person. His research may also explain an apparent paradox in medicine. It might be expected that many of the features of a schizophreniform personality could be considered undesirable, yet the genetic pool that gives rise to these troubles is maintained and the number of suffers remains constant. The suggestion is that for this to have happened these genes must also have some genetic advantage.

It could be that those who inherit the gene do not have gross symptoms but are instead charmingly eccentric, creative, artistic and/or intelligent (the average person with bipolar disorder has a 10 per cent higher IQ than similar contemporaries), and so they find partners with ease and can successfully reproduce.

Dr Nettle was not the first person to discuss these issues. This year we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud, who studied medicine in Vienna following a lecture that included an essay on nature attributed to Goethe. He started as a traditional doctor but was influenced by his research into the clinical uses of cocaine and by the teaching of Charcot, a great 19th-century Parisian neurologist who worked on hysteria and hypnosis.

Freud first used the term psychoanalysis in 1896, published his Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901 and wrote his essays on the theory of sexuality in 1905. Had he visited any of this week’s arty gatherings he might have been unsurprised by the behaviour of his fellow partygoers, as well as intrigued by the sculpture of an “over-stimulated” man that would have greeted him under a painting by his grandson, Lucian, at the Marlborough Gallery party .

Peter Gay’s Freud – A Life for Our Time is available from Max Press at £20