Neuroscience Reveals the Parts of the Brain Responsible for Sexual Arousal & Orgasm
This is your brain on sex and orgasms
Let me start this off by asking a question: where is the most erotic place you can touch a woman? What place will drive her wild, sending tingling feelings throughout her body? What’s the number one place you want to stimulate if you want to leave her speechless?
The answer is her brain.
More specifically, her primary somatosensory cortex.
Sounds sterile, scientific, and probably ultra-boring, I know, but hear me out.
If you want to rock a woman’s world, you want to touch her right here:
The primary somatosensory cortex is the place where women feel erotic pleasure in their brains when sexual touch occurs.
They say the orgasm is in the mind, and modern neuroscience is showing that’s more than just a kitsch cliché.
The Aroused Brain
In a new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, December 2021, titled Sensory-Tactile Functional Mapping and Use-Associated Structural Variation of the Human Female Genital Representation Field, researchers demonstrate that they’ve found the specific part of the brain that activates when the clitoris is touched.
Imagine this lab setting.
Participants were recruited and hooked up to fMRI machines that were capable of reading the brain’s response to tactile feedback.
Subjects then had their clitorises stimulated while the machine read scans of their brains.
Then, for the control, their right hands were stimulated. Once the two snapshots of the brain were captured, they were compared.
The portion above, the dorsolateral areas of S1 (BA1-BA3), activated during clitoral stimulation — but not when the right hand was stimulated.
Structures of Arousal Like Fingerprints
There’s a specific part of the brain dedicated to processing the erotic touch of the genitals. That’s just amazing in and of itself. Furthermore, this area was diverse in the subjects tested.
No two genital representation fields were the same. Like a fingerprint, we all have different sex lives, up to and including the regions of the brain that light up like a Christmas tree when we’re sexually active.
I can’t even begin to think of how many times in my life I’ve heard women complain that they aren’t properly aroused before men want sex. It’s possible that different women require a different amount of stimulation before their brains activate and become fully ready for sex.
Different brains, different needs.
The hypothesis checks out.
Note: this is just a hypothesis, one that should be investigated in future research.