Researchers from the University of Groningen
Medical Centre in the Netherlands have found that for women at least, watching
pornographic videos tends to quiet the part of the brain most heavily involved
in looking at and processing things in the immediate environment, suggesting
that the brain finds arousal more important during that time than is processing
what is actually being seen.
The
team has published a paper in The Journal of Sexual Medicine describing their
findings.
To find
out if the primary
visual cortex is essentially deactivated during sexual arousal in
women, the team enlisted 12 volunteers; all women between the ages of 18 and
47, who had not yet reached menopause.
Also
each was on oral birth control pills which tend to flatten menstrual cycles and
smooth out sexual desire and/or
anxiety. Each was shown three videos, one with no sexual connotation, another
with mild sexual content, and a third that was full on hard-core porn.
While
they were watching the videos, the women were also having their brain activity
watched via PET scans, which work by measuring blood flow to the various brain regions. It is
thought that more blood flow indicates that more brainwork is occurring, which
implies that when the brain delegates tasks to different regions, by sending
more blood, it is demonstrating that it finds certain activities more important
than others.
The
team found virtually no difference in brain activity in
all of the women when watching the first two videos. When watching the third
however, they found that blood flow to the visual cortex was reduced in all of
the volunteers indicating that the brain had decided that focusing on arousal
was more important than fixating on exactly what was occurring on the screen in
front of them (or that women just don’t want to really see what is going on
with sex).
This is
in direct contrast to most other visual activities which tend to cause more
blood to flow to the visual cortex to process all of the information that is
coming in.
The
researchers also suggest their findings help explain why women who exhibit
symptoms of anxiety often report sexual problems, as high anxiety is often
correlated with increased blood flow to the visual cortex due
to the person reacting on a nearly constant basis to visual stimuli.
They
point out that for people in general, the brain cannot be both
anxious and aroused, it generally has to be one or the other, or neither.
More
information: The
Journal of Sexual Medicine, 10 Apr 2012. DOI: 10.1111/j.1743-6109.2012.02706.x
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