Paradoxically, too much orgasm may have been behind his aversion. (One wonders where the poor guy’s tastes shifted once he exhausted his sexual desire for all five races.)
Yet eventually he couldn’t stomach sex with either. In each case, he was sure his happiness depended upon sex with that racial group. (p.95) He was only attracted to Asian sex partners in one phase, and only to African partners in another. Doidge records that the sexual tastes of one of his patients went through phases. This suggests that we might want to think ahead before diving into a particular means of sexual arousal.Īversion can also alter brain maps. Ĭlearly, orgasm is such a powerful reinforcer that it can shape brain maps, with implications for where our future attention is directed without our conscious awareness. … Each time they felt sexual excitement and had an orgasm when they masturbated, a “spritz of dopamine,” the reward neurotransmitter, consolidated the connections made in the brain during the sessions. Though they didn’t know it, they had been seduced into pornographic training sessions that met all the conditions required for plastic change of brain maps. The men at their computers looking at porn were uncannily like t he rats in the cages of the NIH, pressing the bar to get a shot of dopamine or its equivalent. For example, as Norman Doidge explains in The Brain That Changes Itself, Orgasm is a neurochemical blast so delicious that our brains readily wire it (and arousal) to associated events and circumstances.
Groups of nerve cells devoted to a behavior or function are sometimes called “brain maps.” The more intense the associated events, or the more they are repeated, the stronger the wiring. By learning techniques that help us sidestep unwanted wiring, we can even direct the re-wiring process-with seemingly miraculous results.Ī key principle in understanding how we wire, or re-wire, our brains is “neurons that fire together wire together.” That is, if two things happen at the same time, our brains often associate them by means of actual neural connections.
Now, recent neuroscience reveals that our brains are suprisingly plastic throughout our lives. What’s the role of orgasm in wiring artificial sexual tastes?įor most of the last century, neuroscientists were convinced that adult brains were pretty much set.