Mind Hacks

How does the brain generate orgasm? It’s one of the most under-investigated human experiences but two articles, one in the LA Times and another in The Psychologist, discuss some of the key developments of recent years.

The LA Times article is a good description of some of the most interesting neuroscience studies in this developing field, but is a little uncritical in places.

Apparently “About 43% of women and 31% of men in the U.S. between ages 18 and 60 meet criteria for sexual dysfunctions, according to a 1999 report on the sexual behavior of more than 3,000 U.S. adults”.

This report was a research study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that classified sexual dysfunction as reporting any one of the following during the last 12 months:

(1) lacking desire for sex; (2) arousal difficulties (ie, erection problems in men, lubrication difficulties in women); (3) inability achieving climax or ejaculation; (4) anxiety about sexual performance; (5) climaxing or ejaculating too rapidly; (6) physical pain during intercourse; and (7) not finding sex pleasurable

Almost all of which fall within the normal range of a year’s worth of regular sexual experiences, which probably explains why a third to almost half of people surveyed experienced at least one – but hardly a marker of a serious medical problem in itself.

There’s a much better article on orgasm in this month’s The Psychologist by Barry Komisaruk, Carlos Beyer and Beverly Whipple, authors of a recent book on ‘The Science of Orgasm’.

It looks at the research on the roles of neurotransmitters in orgasm, as well as what the brain scanning literature tells us about brain activity during sexual arousal and release.

Most interestingly, it has a good discussion of non-genital orgasm:

As reviewed in Komisaruk et al. (2006), there are published reports of orgasms elicited by stimulation also of lips, hand, knee and anus occurring during dreaming sleep, of phantom limbs, from electrical or chemical stimulation of the septum, amygdala or thalamus of the brain and of the spinal cord.

Orgasms have also been described by men and women when they suffer epileptic seizures that are triggered by specific activity (e.g. brushing the teeth: Chuang et al., 2004), or that occur spontaneously. While these epileptic orgasms are in some cases described as ‘unwelcome’ (Reading & Will, 1997), others describe them as pleasurable, one woman refusing anti-epileptic medication for that reason (Janszky et al., 2004)

We have measured autonomic and brain activity during orgasms that women have produced by thought alone. During the thought orgasms, the magnitude of the increases in heart rate, blood pressure, pain threshold, pupil diameter, and brain regions are similar to those that we observe during vaginal or cervical self-stimulation-induced orgasms (Whipple et al., 1992). It is not surprising that in those cases of thought-induced orgasms, the specific genital sensory thalamic and cortical, and specific limb-motoric regions, are not activated.

The article notes that a number of different nerve pathways may serve to communicate sensual stimulation to the brain, which may account for why different sites of stimulation can produce orgasm.

Link to LA Times article ‘Science of the orgasm’
Link the The Psychologist article on orgasm.

Full discloser: I’m an unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist.

A 61 year-old lady was admitted to a Florida hospital with florid hallucinations after suffering a stroke to her thalamus. She saw curious strangers and visitors with odd clothes, but rather unusually, the ones on the right always seemed pleasant and happy, whereas the ones on the left always seemed fearful and unsettling.

The case was reported in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychiatry and is of interest because the emotional content of the hallucinations seem to match the dominant emotion of the corresponding hemisphere of the brain.

[The patient] described the right visual hallucinations as consisting of “college age boys in colourful Hawaiian shirts” that “are too happy, talk too much”, and that are somewhat “too energetic”. The patient called them the “he-haw boys,” and reported that she could hear them talking.

The left visual hallucinations were described as “men in black religious clothes that make no noises.” The patient called them “the eye drillers”, and stated that “they look a hole right through you”. The patient provided vivid drawings of the hallucinations that accentuated the positive and negative associations she had with each hallucination. The patient provided vivid drawings of the hallucinations that accentuated the positive and negative associations she had with each hallucination.

This is not the first time that hallucinations have been reported to be differing in emotional tone depending on which side of space they appear.

This is likely due to the way emotion is processed in the brain.

Perception of negative emotions often relies largely on the right hemisphere, where positive emotions are processed by both the right and the left hemispheres. In fact, this pattern of brain response has been found in children as young as 10 months old.

The woman in this case report didn’t suffer damage to the hemispheres directly, but to the thalamus. This area is often called the brain’s relay station as it is extensively connected to hemispheres, so damage in this area can often mimic damage to the cortex.

Link to PubMed abstract of case report.

‘Impostor Syndrome’ is where someone feels they aren’t as competent as everyone else thinks they are and fears they could be found out.

I’ve heard the term used by psychologists and in everyday language to describe this situation but never realised it’s been the subject of serious psychological research.

Several studies have looked at the issue and The New York Times has a brief article on the findings. They suggest that the ‘syndrome’ is actually more subtle than the simple description lets on – in fact, it may be a way of managing others’ expectations.

In a study published in September [pdf], Rory O’Brien McElwee and Tricia Yurak of Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., had 253 students take an exhaustive battery of tests assessing how people present themselves in public. They found that psychologically speaking, impostorism looked a lot more like a self-presentation strategy than a personality trait.

In an interview, Dr. McElwee said that as a social strategy, projecting oneself as an impostor can lower expectations for a performance and take pressure off a person — as long as the self-deprecation doesn’t go too far. “It’s the difference between saying you got drunk before the SAT and actually doing it,” she said. “One provides a ready excuse, and the other is self-destructive.”

Link to NYT article on ‘impostor syndrome’.
pdf of McElwee and Yurak’s paper.

Clinical psychologist Dan Kindlon has been researching children and adolescents for over 20 years and argues that the psychology of American girls has radically changed in recent years owing to the effect of feminism and increased equality.

Harvard Magazine has an article on what he calls ‘alpha girls’ in his new book – confident girls and young women with high expectations and high self-esteem.

“The psychological demons that used to affect girls and women in this country just don‚Äôt affect today‚Äôs girls in the same way,” Kindlon asserts. In the 1980s and early ‚Äô90s, Carol Gilligan (formerly Graham professor of gender studies at Harvard Graduate School of Education and now a professor at New York University) and other feminist psychologists wrote that girls in their teens compromise their authenticity to fit gender roles, thereby “losing their voice.” In 1992, influential American Association of University Women (AAUW) research on late-1980s data on girls born in the 1970s found that girls’ self-esteem plunged in middle school, compared to boys’, and that classroom sexism (such as teachers’ calling on boys more than girls, or more competitive than cooperative learning) was a cause. The AAUW report recognized positive trends, such as young women‚Äôs ascent in college enrollment, while recommending correctives for the continuing shortfalls.

Alpha girls are created in large numbers when the society that they are born into has sufficient equal opportunity, Kindlon says: “It wasn‚Äôt until the early to mid ’80s‚Äîwhen schools really started to get serious about Title IX, when women first began to outnumber men in college, when women began moving into leadership roles, such as Congress, in significant numbers‚Äîthat societal conditions had changed enough to permit the alpha girl explosion.” He set out to discover how Beauvoir’s “inner metamorphosis” has changed girls’ psychology in the years since the AAUW report.

Link to Harvard Magazine article ‘Girl Power’.