Humpjones

Sex Science 2007: Part One

Posted May 19, 2008 5 comments

There’s been a lot of redundant research in the news lately—do we really need a study to tell us that images of hot naked women reduce a man’s ability to make rational decisions?  Apparently we did. And somehow...the world is a better place.

What’s been much more interesting—at least to an over-educated pervert such as myself—is the recent rash of studies that completely subvert conventional wisdom about human sexuality.  The human brain is a very strange thing, and neurological “facts” get overturned every 3 to 5 years these days, so of course all this new information might have an expiration date.  Just the same, it’s the only new information we have, so let’s start sniffing the panties of modern science.

Dirty Pictures Make You Go Blind

“We observed that people fail to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after neutral images,” David Zald, assistant professor of psychology and member of the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development, said.

They called it “emotion-based blindness”—further proof that all scientists should give me a call before they name anything, ever again.  What’s especially interesting about the Zald experiments is that gory images had the exact same effect as erotic images—either way, the brain can’t process any visual input immediately afterwards.  For instance, at this point in the article, there’s two sets of tits on the screen—are you having a hard time concentrating on the words?

“We think that there is essentially a bottleneck for information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it can basically jam up that bottleneck so subsequent information can�t get through,” Zald said. “It appears to happen involuntarily.”

This parallels another recent study, funded by ad companies, into the effectiveness of sex in television advertising.  Their findings were surprisingly complex: first of all, men are more likely to remember an advertisement if it contains sexual imagery, but women were less likey to remember that same ad.  More curiously, any form of advertising that was playing during the commercial break of a TV show with lots of sexual imagery would be less likey to be remembered by either sex.  In other words, if you’re going to use titties to sell cars, do it during the evening news, not Baywatch.  It remains to be seen wether or not this study will lead to less gratuitous sexuality bullshit on TV, but my fingers are not exactly crossed, you know?

Human Brains: Hardwired for Porno

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis measured brainwave activity of 264 women as they viewed a series of 55 color slides that contained various scenes from water skiers to snarling dogs to partially-clad couples in sensual poses.

As subjects looked at the slides, electrodes on their scalps measured changes in the brain’s electrical activity called event-related potentials (ERPs). The researchers learned that regardless of a picture’s content, the brain acts very quickly to classify the visual image. The ERPs begin firing in the brain’s cortex long before a person is conscious of whether they are seeing a picture that is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.

But when the picture is erotic, ERPs begin firing within 160 milliseconds, about 20 percent faster than occurred with any of the other pictures. Soon after, the ERPs begin to diverge, with processing taking place in different brain structures for erotic pictures than those that process the other images.

Like most research into visual processing, this also raises some fairly disturbing questions about the nature of “free will” when our brains know things before “we” do, but let’s just gloss over that for now.  What’s signifigant here is that this study was done with women, and it’s pretty safe to assume the results with men would be at least around the same, if not even faster and more attuned to the porn.  Perhaps men have evolved an entirely separate neural pathway for exposed nipples and split beaver shots—but I leave that kind of speculation to the professionals.

McGill University also did a recent study that throws a classic “Gender Gap” issue into serious question—namely, the arousal curve.  Common sense (at least for those of us who get laid) holds that men get turned on much, much faster than women do.  This is why men are subjected to the frankly offensive ritual of “foreplay” instead of just penetrating a woman and ejaculating ten strokes later....you know, like the Good Lord intended.

Anyways, the new science of “thermal imaging” has finally seen some logical application in the bedroom and the results have people in lab coats scratching their heads.

“Comparing sexual arousal between men and women, we see that there is no difference in the amount of time it takes healthy young men and women to reach peak arousal,” said Dr. Irv Binik, psychology professor and founder and director of the Sex and Couple Therapy Service of Royal Victoria Hospital, which is part of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC).

Previously, sex researchers have measured arousal with instruments that require genital contact and manipulation. Binik focused thermographic cameras on his subjects’ genitals while they watched a montage of material from pornography to horror movies to The Best of Mr. Bean to Canadian tourism travelogues to provide a base of control data.

(The article never clarified if Mr. Bean was supposed to be arousing or part of the control data, but I sent them an email so hopefully we’ll find out.)

Much More to Cum

We’ll keep exploring the sticky frontier tomorrow—meanwhile, keep emailing me weird porn and good news stories, I definitely appreciate the help. 

PART TWO

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