Ian Sample reports for the Guardian that the animation will help scientists understand how the female brain conducts the symphony of activity that leads to an orgasm:
Scientists have used brain scan images to create the world’s first movie of the female brain as it approaches, experiences and recovers from an orgasm. The animation reveals the steady buildup of activity in the brain as disparate regions flicker into life and then come together in a crescendo of activity before gently settling back down again.
To make the animation, researchers monitored a woman’s brain as she lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and stimulated herself. The research will help scientists to understand how the brain conducts the symphony of activity that leads to sexual climax in a woman.
By studying people who have orgasms, Professor Barry Komisaruk, a psychologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey and his team hope to uncover what goes wrong in both men and women who cannot reach sexual climax.
The animation was compiled from sequential brain scans of Nan Wise, a 54-year-old PhD student and sex therapist in Komisaruk’s lab. “It’s my dissertation,” Wise told the Guardian. “I’m committed to it.”…
[continues at the Guardian]
