For years men have been clumsily probing women’s bodies in search of their erogenous zones. It turns out we’ve been missing the obvious culprit: the brain!
“Waitaminute, Wil,” you say. “You mean to get women in the mood we should be sawing off the top of their skull and stimulating their brain directly?”
Yes… I mean, what? No! I just mean that by examining how the strip of brain dedicated to physical sensation — the sensory cortex — responds to erotic touch, we find points of interest. For instance…
Komisaruk also checked what happened when women’s nipples were stimulated, and was surprised to find that in addition to the chest area of the cortex lighting up, the genital area was also activated. “When I tell my male neuroscientist colleagues about this, they say: ‘Wow, that’s an exception to the classical homunculus,’” he says. “But when I tell the women they say: ‘Well, yeah?’” It may help explain why a lot of women claim that nipple stimulation is erotic, he adds.
On a related note, you might recall my post about a man who found his sensory cortex representation for his amputated foot connected to his representation of his penis.