Boing Boing latches on to one element of a new study regarding women, orgasms, and brain scans . . . Orgasms "turn off" part of female brains . . .

Scientists report that parts of a woman’s brain switch off when she has an orgasm, including regions involved with emotion. Neuroanatomists from the University of Gronigen ran PET scans on women as they were resting, getting diddled by their partner’s fingers, experiencing the "big O," or faking it. From New Scientist…

The thing is . . . they’re not noting the whole story in that men’s brains are also affected. It isn’t really so much that part of the brain shuts down but that they become inactive in part as the orgasm may be a way to help women shut down elements of the psyche that put up reservations or fences . . . allowing the woman to surrender to the moment in a way that helps ensure relationship building via surrender and bonding that might make likelihood of pairings that lead to conception more likely . . . maybe . . . the actual mechanism is evident but the outcome goal of the behavior is more elusive.

The study has been carried by a number of news sources with either more or less information . . . CNN decided to concentrate on the fact that faked orgasms don’t fool brain scans in that the same study found that while real orgasms are very evident via brain scans, faked ones which might fool a partner are obviously faked to the scanner as the brain activity registers completely differnetly . . . however, there is a lot more important bits to the study than just faking orgasms while your partner masturbates your private parts:

Women may be able to fool their partners by faking an orgasm but a brain scanner will catch them every time, a conference heard on Monday. Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have used scans to show that different areas of the brain are stimulated during an orgasm but are not activated when a woman fakes it. "Women can imitate orgasm quite well," Gert Holstege told a fertility meeting on Monday. "But there is nothing really happening in the brain." He and colleagues took brain scans of 13 women and 11 men, aged 19-49 who had volunteered for the study, while they were being sexually stimulated by their partner and during an orgasm and compared them to images of their brains at rest. "We wanted to know what the brain was doing during orgasm," Holstege said. When women genuinely achieved an orgasm, areas of the brain involved in fear and emotion were deactivated. Those areas stayed alert however when women were faking it. The researchers also found that the cortex, which is linked with consciousness, is active during a fake orgasm but not during the real thing. "The deactivation of these very important parts of the brain might be the most important thing necessary to have an orgasm," said Holstege. "It means that if you are fearful or at a very high level of anxiety, then it is very difficult to have sex because you really have to let yourself go," he added. The brain scans for men during orgasm were less conclusive, according to Holstege. But they did show that different parts of the male and female brain are activated and deactivated during sexual stimulation. The researchers found less deactivation in the males in the areas of the brain linked to emotion and fear when they were sexually stimulated. They are now planning further studies to compared the male and female brains during orgasm.

So, when women have genuine orgasms, the areas of the brain related to fear and emotion are temporarily disabled in order to enhance the experience while those areas are affected far less in men who tend to focus on physical sensations during sex.

Now . . . what I would find interesting is to hook up women to the brain scan who have been taught to have orgasms hypnotically without any physical stimulation and see if the brain scans are closer to the genuine orgasm scans, the faked orgasm scans, or if they are of a different order altogether. My hypotheses is that they would be similar to or the same as genuine orgasms and would most definately not be similar to the faked orgasms in quality or context. To learn how to achieve orgasm via only mental or emotional stimulation in trance, see my section on Erotic and Sexual Hypnosis.

All the best,
Brian