Sponsored Infograph: Your Brain on Sex

When we talk about lust and desire, the brain isn’t instantly the first organ that comes to mind! The brain however has been called our largest sexual organ, and for good reason. Thanks to it’s pleasure centre the brain tells us when an experience is enjoyable, that’s not all though. Take a look at the many ways the brain impacts on one of the most fundamental feelings humans produce – infograph below – One study revealed that it takes quarter of a second to decide whether or not a person looked desirable.

Discovery Magazine The first imaging studies of sex in the brain have appeared only in the past few years. Serge Stoléru, a neuroscientist at Pierre and Marie Curie University in France, published one on sexual desire in 2003. He and his colleagues showed a series of pictures and films - some erotic, some ordinary – to 15 men. To record the activity in the subjects’ brains, the scientists used PET scans: They injected radioactive tracers into the volunteers and then tracked how the tracers moved in the brain. The radioactive signal accumulated in areas where neurons became active, as their energy was replenished by the surrounding blood vessels.

From this study, researchers revealed that eight of the men were ordinary, sexually speaking. The other seven suffered from hypoactive sexual desire disorder. People with this condition rarely experience sexual desires or fantasies. Stoléru and his colleagues found clear-cut differences between the two groups. In particular, a patch of neurons near the front of the brain—a region called the medial orbitofrontal cortex—was active in the desire-impaired men but quiet in the normal ones. Among its jobs, the medial orbitofrontal cortex keeps our emotions from getting out of control. Perhaps men with hypoactive sexual desire disorder couldn’t feel desire because their brains were keeping their emotions bottled up ::::

Read the full Discovery article here :: discovermagazine.com/where-does-sex-live-in-brain

 From: MedicalBillingandCoding.org