10 Interesting Facts About Your Brain on Sex

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/10-interesting-facts-about-your-brain-sex



***SNIP

1. Size matters.

The preoptic area of the hypothalamus, which regulates mating behavior, is a little more than twice as big in men as it is in women and has twice as many cells. Medical Net says difference starts to show up when we’re about four years old.

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2. Location. Location. Location.

The male brain devotes twice as much real estate to sex as the female brain. They think about it, but do they listen about it?

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3. In what part of the brain do we find the “Not tonight, honey" headache?

It was a comic trope of the olden days for women who didn’t want sex to opt out due to headache, but it turns out migraine sufferers seem to have a higher libido than other sufferers. LiveScience reported on a 2006 study from the Wake Forest School of Medicine which found that people who suffer from migraine headaches reported a sex drive about 20% higher than those prone to regular tension headaches. The key might be the neurotransmitter serotonin. High serotonin levels are associated with low libido; the researchers reported that migraine sufferers had low serotonin levels. And About.com reports that a 2001 survey of women who had sex during migraines 30% noticed a decrease in pain, 5.3% said the pain increased, and 17.5% reported the pain went away.

***SNIP

4. Considering all the kinds of headaches it causes rather than cures, why do we even have sex in the first place?

Dr. Joseph Shrand is an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. (He also happens to be Joe from the TV show Zoom! -- if you’re a '70s kid that brought on some of the feel-good chemistry we’re going to talk about in a minute.) Shrand has a wonderfully concise way of explaining why we let ourselves in for the sturm und drang of sex. When we describe love and sexual passion “we use the word 'intoxicating' and that’s a very important word,” Shrand said in a phone interview. “There is dopamine involved in that sort of lustful attraction,” a neurotransmitter associated with excitement, reward, desire, pleasure and in some case addiction.

[In_The_Wind]

1. Hell yeah.

I'll have some more Oxytocin, please.