Have you ever thought about why porn works? Seriously, why does seeing other people engaging in sex acts make us physically prepared to engage in sex ourselves - that is, why does it turn us on? Obviously not all porn turns on all people, and men are supposedly more responsive to it than women, but if you’re on this site you’ve probably been aroused by viewing porn at least once. The intuitive answer might be that seeing people having sex makes us think about having sex, which then leads to arousal. Makes perfect sense - except it’s apparently not correct. Watching other people have sex turns us on because it makes us think we are having sex.

I’ll qualify that a little. It makes part of our brains called mirror neurons think we are having sex. A recently released study monitored brain activity in people who were being shown images of aroused genitalia, apparently to determine whether “the sexual preference of the observer determines the neuronal responsiveness to pure male or female sexual stimuli in the human reward and motor system”. (I’m not a scientist, but that seems like kind of a basic assumption. Next! A study to determine whether water is wet!) They found that the subjects were, in fact, aroused by the genitals that arouse them (yay science), but the way it happened in the brain is what we’re interested in here.

Seeing the arousing images triggered the premotor cortex, which is where we find imitative, or mirror, neurons. Mirror neurons “mirror” the action of another person (or even animal), as though the observer was actually engaging in the action. They’re part of the same neurons that fire if you move your body to do the action you see, in fact. As you watch a movie there’s a part of your brain that’s imitating what you’re seeing, so if you’re watching someone fucking, there’s a part of your brain that’s doing it, too! (Of course, that also means that if you’re watching someone fucking while in an obviously uncomfortable but photogenic position, as often happens in porn, your brain may think you’re doing that instead, which can be a bummer.) It’s not just porn - this applies to pretty much all other activities and is why seeing some get sick can make us queasy and watching a boxing match makes us punchy. Our brains are constantly using the information they’re getting from the eyes to learn about the world and how to get around in it.

This makes me wonder about about this supposed lack of responsiveness in women to porn. Currently the vast majority of porn is produced by men for men - this is, in fact, one of the things Good Vibes exists to remedy. What if women aren’t responsive to porn because they’re wired differently, but because they’re wired exactly the same, but are watching and mirroring different things when they see it? Could it be that the arguments made against porn, that it’s anti-woman for example, are actually our mirror neurons seeing it and thinking “Oh my aching back”? Okay, that’s trivializing a complicated issue, but it does make me wonder if one day great porn will be produced by wiring some people up to an fMRI machine and seeing where their brains light up. Oh brave new world…

via The Frontal Cortex blog

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