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A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desireby Ogi Ogas
Synopses & Reviews
Two maverick neuroscientists use the world's largest psychology experiment-the Internet-to study the private activities of millions of men and women around the world, unveiling a revolutionary and shocking new vision of human desire that overturns conventional thinking.
For his groundbreaking sexual research, Alfred Kinsey and his team interviewed 18,000 people, relying on them to honestly report their most intimate experiences. Using the Internet, the neuroscientists Ogas and Gaddam quietly observed the raw sexual behaviors of half a billion people. By combining their observations with neuroscience and animal research, these two young neuroscientists finally answer the long-disputed question: what do people really like? Ogas and Gaddam's findings are transforming the way scientists and therapists think about sexual desire.
In their startling book, Ogas and Gaddam analyze a "billion wicked thoughts" on the Internet: a billion Web searches, a million individual search histories, a million erotic stories, a half-million erotic videos, a million Web sites, millions of online personal ads, and many other enormous sources of sexual data in order to understand the true differences between male and female desires, including:
?Men and women have hardwired sexual cues analogous to our hardwired tastes-there are sexual versions of sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter. But men and women are wired with different sets of cues.
?The male sexual brain resembles a reckless hunter, while the female sexual brain resembles a cautious detective agency.
?Men form their sexual interests during adolescence and rarely change. Women's sexual interests are plastic and change frequently.
?The male sexual brain is an "or gate": A single stimulus can arouse it. The female sexual brain is an "and gate": It requires many simultaneous stimuli to arouse it.
?When it comes to sexual arousal, men prefer overweight women to underweight women, and a significant number of men seek out erotic images of women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.
?Women enjoy writing and sharing erotic stories with other women. The fastest growing genre of erotic stories for women are stories about two heterosexual men having sex.
?Though the male sexual brain is much more different from the female sexual brain than is commonly believed, the sexual brain of gay men is virtually identical to that of straight men.
Featuring cutting-edge, jaw-dropping science, this wildly entertaining and controversial book helps readers understand their partner's sexual desires with a depth of knowledge unavailable from any other source. Its fascinating and occasionally disturbing findings will rock our modern understanding of sexuality, just as Kinsey's reports did sixty years ago.
"Behavioral scientists Ogas and Gaddam used the Internet — sifting through a billion Web searches, analyzing hundreds of thousands of online erotic stories, the 40,000 most trafficked adult Web sites, five million sexual solicitations posted on online classifieds, and a great deal more online sexual expressions — to determine the secret desires of a billion anonymous men and women. Their less surprising findings are that male desire is instantly activated by visual cues and directed toward orgasm. Women are more aroused by psychological cues, and the vast majority of romance readers like a 'strong, confident, swaggering alpha' hero. More unusual findings are that straight men and masculine professions are the dominant motif in gay male porn, and gay men like the same things in their porn as straight guys: youth, graphic details of the body, and anonymous, emotionless, nonmonogamous sex. Viewers of porn sites directed at women prefer foreplay and intercourse, and many men are aroused by the thought of their wives cheating on them. Although striving to titillate and be cute (using Elmer Fudd and Miss Marple as male and female metaphors, for example), this study can be maddeningly vague ('many men,' 'very popular') as it offers some insights amid mostly familiar observations. (May)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
The Book on Sex
Want to know what really turns your partner on? A Billion Wicked Thoughts offers the clearest picture ever of the differences between male and female sexuality and the teeming diversity of human desire. What makes men attracted to images and so predictable in their appetites? What makes the set up to a romantic evening so important for a woman? Why are women’s desires so hard to predict? Neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam reveal the mechanics of sexual relationships based on their extensive research into the mountains of new data on human behavior available in online entertainment and traffic around the world. Not since Alfred Kinsey in the 1950s has there been such a revolution in our knowledge of what is really going on in the bedroom. What Ogas and Gaddam learned, and now share, will deepen and enrich the way you, and your partner, think and talk about sex.
About the Author
Ogi Ogas received his PhD in computational neuroscience from Boston University, where he designed mathematical models of learning, memory, and vision. Ogi was a Department of Homeland Security Fellow and conducted biodefense research at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He resides in Boston.
Sai Gaddam, PhD, conducted his doctoral research at Boston University on biologically inspired models of machine learning. He collaborated with Hewlett- Packard to design nanoscale processors that mimic noisy, massively parallel brain computations, and now offers his data mining expertise to companies looking to understand customer preferences. He splits his time between Boston and Hyderabad, India.
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