People differ in the way they react to stimuli of a marked sexual nature. According to recent research, men tend to overestimate the sexual signals sent by the opposite sex, which increases their success rate. And it is that a greater capacity to respond to these signals predisposes to be more motivated in order to finally maintain relationships. In the case of graphic stimuli, the strength with which the brain responds to the visualization of images is linked to the number of bed partners that a person has had in the last year. It is the conclusion of a work that was published in 2014 and was a pioneer in associating the brain response to pornography and sexual behavior in real life.
The team of researchers, from the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure a particular type of electrical activity in the participants’ brains as they observed a sequence of images that ranged from romantic to pornographic. , going through the neutral. The activity in question is known as “late positive potential” and is a reflection of the emotional intensity that the images arouse. According to the authors, the difference lay in the excitement provoked by the more subtle photographs, which only hinted at a bawdy situation. Those with a long history showed the same response to more and less explicit images, while those with limited experience only responded to the obvious. It follows from this that individuals who have a more daring and reckless sexual behavior are more sensitive to mild sexual signals.
The finding will help scientists develop a brain stimulation intervention to reduce sensitivity to sexual reward and facilitate self-control in people prone to engaging in high-risk sexual activities.
The erotic information that reaches our subconscious
Another interesting study, and that the popularizer Pere Estupinyá describes in his book S = ex2, the science of sex was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and talks about the role that sight plays in sexual attraction. In the experiment, the researchers passed images, below the detection threshold, of naked men and women to a group of volunteers that included heterosexual men and women and homosexual men. The scientists observed that heterosexual men responded positively to subliminal images of naked women and ignored male images, and the opposite was true for homosexual men and heterosexual women. This is an example of how, literally, our gaze fades when faced with certain erotic stimuli, no matter how small.
“All the information captured by our senses reaches the brain, but only a minority are aware of it. We have selective attention, which allows us to discriminate between different visual stimuli and ignore those that are irrelevant. But the unconscious does receive them, and sometimes it forces us to act ”, writes Estupinyá. This study shows that we are capable of reacting to erotic information that had been captured only by our unconscious.
