for SCIENCE!

I’m belatedly realizing that this wasn’t the best time to start a reading blog, since I also just started a programming class at PSU and now have even less time to read than I did before. I’ll try to write something later about a couple of cognitive imaging papers. In the meantime, I’ll fall back on the beloved Hollywood trick of glossing over a lack of content or depth by talking about sex!

I thought about this article yesterday while in the MRI scanner for the first time: Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal. I’m amazed they pulled it off — it’s pretty cramped in there! I guess they did remove the table to make it more spacious. This testimonial by one of the women involved is pretty awesome.

A search for “MRI orgasm” on Medline turned up a paltry 7 results, one of which was this: Tooth-brushing epilepsy with ictal orgasms. Vast untapped potential for study here, people! Get it together!

PS: I have very shapely and well-developed basal ganglia. Also, my mind-reading paranoia was (faintly) justified: apparently when you ponder probability distributions for an experimental task and/or try to force yourself to stop thinking about sex in the middle of a functional scan, the associated blood flow to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is readily observable!