“His fury had driven him to quote in Latin, and he would have quoted in Chinese and Greenlandic if he had known those languages, for he was undergoing one of those crises in which the entire soul indistinctly shows what it contains, just as, in a storm, the sea fleetingly opens to reveal everything from the seaweed on its shore to the sand of its greatest depths.”
—Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
May 2009
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“One cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafés, of all chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of book shops, of kiosques, and of galleries, of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo, and of the Butte Chaumont, of the Guarangy Trust Company and the Ile de la Cité, of Foyot’s old hotel, and of being able to read and relax in the evening; of all things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy.”
—(For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway)
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Lawn chair, asphalt, a tall clear glass of Jack Daniels & lemonade.
(“Nothin’ No”—David Vandervelde)
"Fearless Volunteers" Sacrifice in the Name of Science →
latimes.com
As they seek to document and demystify one of life’s great thrills, scientists have run across some real head-scratchers.
How, for example, can they explain the fact that some men and women who are paralyzed and numb below the waist are able to have orgasms?How to explain the “orgasmic auras” that can descend at the onset of epileptic seizures — sensations so pleasurable they prompt some patients to refuse antiseizure medication?
And how on Earth to explain the case of the amputee who felt his orgasms centered in that missing foot?
No one — no sexologist, no neuroscientist — really knows. For a subject with so many armchair experts, the human orgasm is remarkably mysterious.
But today, a few scientists are making real progress — in part because they’re changing their focus. To uncover the orgasm’s secrets, researchers are looking beyond the clitoris, vagina, penis and prostate, to the place behind the scenes where the true magic happens. They’re examining the central nervous system: the network of electrical impulses that zip to and fro through the brain and spinal cord.
In an orgasm orchestra, the genitalia may be the instruments, but the central nervous system is the conductor.
Armed with new lab tools and fearless volunteers, scientists are getting first-ever glimpses of how the brain lights up (and, in places, shuts down) when the orgasmic fireworks go off. They’re tracing nerves and finding new pathways for pleasure that help explain how people with shattered spinal cords can defy sexual expectations.
A few labs are even tinkering with devices that could put patients directly in touch with their orgasmic abilities by letting them observe their sexual brain patterns and “train” themselves to find the elusive frisson, or (in something akin to the Orgasmatron in Woody Allen’s 1973 movie “Sleeper”) letting them zap a sweet spot in their spinal cord with toe-curling electrical pulses.
“There’s a tremendous amount we don’t know about orgasms,” says Barry R. Komisaruk, psychology professor at Rutgers University and coauthor of the 2006 book “The Science of Orgasm.” “But we’re on the verge of getting a lot of very important information and really understanding what to do with it.”
“Science of the Orgasm” (Los Angeles Times)
