Sexpert
Crosswords won't cut it: orgasms are key to a healthy brain
Sarah Berry
Published: August 6, 2013 - SMH
Like anyone needs an excuse, it turns out orgasms are better for your brain than Sudoku or a challenging crossword.
"Mental exercises increase brain activity but only in relatively localised regions," Professor Barry Komisaruk, a neuroscientist from Rutgers University told The Times. "Orgasm activates the whole."
If warding off a bedraggled mind is not enough impetus to kick the crossword and engage in a little carnal ecstasy, orgasms may also be an elixir for youth.
At least, they have been for Komisaruk, 72, who has been studying orgasms since the 60s.
"I guess the orgasms keep me young," he said. "At orgasm we see a tremendous increase in the blood flow (to the brain). So my belief is it can't be bad. It brings all the nutrients and oxygenation to the brain."
The intensity of the sensation may also provide pain relief, he said. In fact, one of his studies found that during orgasm, 30 areas of the brain are activated, including touch, memory and reward as well as pain.
Komisaruk started out studying orgasms by sexually stimulating rats whilst scanning their brains. By the 80s, and despite protests that studying animals was science but women was not, he was authorised to work with women.
In a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine, or fMRI scanner, the orgasm 'donators' pleasure themselves to climax while he maps their brains.
He believes there's still much more work to do. Apart from trying to figure out why as many as one in three women can't climax while others can think themselves there, it's possible to take the big O to whole new heights.
This is achieved by stimulating multiple areas at once.
"Then the orgasms can be more intense, more complex, more pleasurable," he says. "That's a take-home message from this research."
Orgasms aside, he believes further research can teach us how to consciously control the pleasure parts of the brain.
"We know virtually nothing about pleasure," he said. "It's important to understand how the brain produces it. What parts of the brain produce such intense pleasure, and can we use that in some way? What would that do to depression or anxiety or addiction or pain?"
In this way, he argues it's not all fun and orgasms; there is a serious side to his science.
"We are desensitising people,' Komisaruk said. 'They used to be very squeamish about it and we're very straightforward about it. They don't make fun of it, we don't make fun of it. A lot of people take it very seriously."
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sooo - does than mean the older you get, the smarter you become :jagsatwork:
