Friday 12 October 2012

The science of lust, or hormonal programing for humanoid robots

As far as I can see it humans contradict themselves with all sorts of issues due to a change of opinion or forgetfulness over time. Its in our chemistry that basic survival out ranks our random thoughts. Discouraging people from having premarital sex has never, not once, not at any point in human history, succeeded in getting people to actually stop having sex. 95% of Americans have sex before they get married. Even in previous generations, the vast majority of Americans got busy before they tied the knot. So pretending that abstinence is a viable option for any meaningful segment of the population is at best obtuse and at worst really stupid. Fact! Having sex once a week is the happiness equivalent of an extra $50,000 in the bank.
Especially if you're having sex with a rich person. According to their small new study, people — at least women — may be able to get over the “ick” factor associated with sex by getting turned on. Sexual arousal overrides the natural disgust response, the researchers found, and allows women to willingly engage in behaviors that they might normally find repugnant.
The study, conducted by scientists at the University of Groningen, involved 90 women who were randomly assigned to one of three groups. One group watched a “female friendly” erotic video; another watched a video of high-adrenaline sports like skydiving or rafting, designed to be arousing but not sexually so; and the third group watched a neutral video clip of a train. Afterward, all the women were asked to perform 16 tasks, most of them icky, like drinking from a cup with a bug in it (the bug was fake), wiping their hands with a used tissue, eating a cookie that was next to a live worm or putting their finger in a tray of used condoms.
The researchers found that the women who watched the sexually arousing video rated the unpleasant tasks as less disgusting than did their counterparts who were not sexually aroused. They were also more likely to complete more of the tasks, suggesting that sexual arousal not only dampens the disgust response but also influences how much women are willing to do.
That helps explain why so many people keep having sex, despite the inherent messiness of it, the researchers said. “The findings indicate that both the impact of heightened sexual arousal on subjective disgust and also on disgust-induced avoidance will act in a way to facilitate the engagement in pleasurable sex,” the authors wrote. Previous studies suggest that sexual arousal has the same effect on men.

A new journal article suggests that evolutionary forces also push women to be more sexual, although in unexpected ways. University of Texas psychologist David Buss wrote the article, which appears in the July issue of Personality and Individual Differences, with the help of three graduate students, Judith Easton (who is listed as lead author), Jaime Confer and Cari Goetz. Buss, Easton and their colleagues found that women in their 30s and early 40s are significantly more sexual than younger women. Women ages 27 through 45 report not only having more sexual fantasies (and more intense sexual fantasies) than women ages 18 through 26 but also having more sex, period. And they are more willing than younger women to have casual sex, even one-night stands. In other words, despite the girls-gone-wild image of promiscuous college women, it is women in their middle years who are America's most sexually industrious.
After the mid-20s, the lizard-brain impulse to have more kids faces a stark reality: it's harder and harder to get pregnant as a woman's remaining eggs age. And so women in their middle years respond by seeking more and more sex. To test this theory, psychologist David Buss and his students asked 827 women to complete questionnaires about their sexual habits. And, indeed, they found that women who had passed their peak fertility years but not quite reached menopause were the most sexually active. This age group — 27 through 45 — reported having significantly more sex than the two other age groups in the study, 18 through 26 and 46 and up. Women in their middle years were also more likely than the younger women to fantasize about someone other than their current partner. The new findings are consistent with those of an earlier Buss paper, from 2002, which found that women in their early 30s feel more lustful and report less abstinence than women in other age groups.
In both studies, these findings held true for both partnered and single women, meaning that married women in their 30s and early 40s tend to have more sex than married women in their early 20s; ditto for single women. Also, whether the women were mothers didn't matter. Only age had a strong affect on women's reported sexual interest and behavior. Despite three-quarters of the participants in the study were recruited on Craigslist, a website where many go to seek hookups, meaning there was a self-selection problem with the sample. (The other participants were students at the University of Texas in Austin.) The authors also note that there are some alternative explanations for why women in their 30s and early 40s might be more sexual. Many of them may simply be more comfortable with sex than women in their teens and early 20s. Still, that raises the question of why they are more comfortable: perhaps evolution programmed that comfort.
In a recent study lust in men have a sensitive trigger mechanism and that visual stimulus works better then for women. Lust in women have a subtle manifestation in that their expression for lust is expressed by how caring she can be. In a documentary women placed in a flirting environment with men show more of a caring nature with other people then placed in a bare room. The theory is that woman are wired to care as potential mothers, even at an early stage of arousal to ensure attraction and as a maternal preparational response.
According to researchers, lust, is the sensation that causes us to go out looking for a mate. It's the chemicals estrogen and testosterone that are at work here.Then there's attraction or being "love struck" . This is the part where you lose your appetite, can't sleep, get sweaty palms and higher heart rate etc. This keeps us going back for more of this person. The love chemicals at this stage are mostly the same ones that are increased whenever we have a new adventure or excitement: the monoamines. These include dopamine, norepinephidrine, phenylethylamine (PEA) and serotonin. Basically, these affect us as if taking amphetamines, stimulants and painkillers!
Dopamine makes us feel happy while serotonin and norepinephidrine make us feel more excited. PEA is the big player here which excites us and helps the transition from lust to love. It's this chemical rush caused by PEA that creates the addiction to being in love. Alas, after a couple of years of the excitement stage, comes the attachment stage. These processes overlap one another in that the in love chemicals don't just disappear but lessen over time and are replaced with other chemicals.
At this stage, oxytocin,, the same chemical involved in childbirth and bonding to the infant, shows up in the blood of both men and women . This stage is often referred to as the attachment stage. Oxytocin is released during orgasm in both men and women. It has been postulated that the more sex the couple has, the more bonded they will become. Vasopressin, also called the monogamy hormone, comes into play during the attachment phase as well. Vasopressin seems to keep us protective of our mates.
Other chemicals, called endorphins are released during and after sex. These give us that "feel good feeling" similar to the feeling after a hard exercise session (endorphins are also released during exercise).
An observation: the in love chemicals take about 2 to 3 years to fade out and be replaced by the bonding chemicals. Have you noticed that this is the time when many people start to find their mates not as interesting or exciting as they once did? Has this happened to you? The person hasn't changed. The chemicals that attracted you to them have faded. Many people, however, find that the attachment feel good chemicals are much more fulfilling than the attraction chemicals. Evolutionarily, the theory is that the couple stays together long enough to raise a child out of infancy. Then both men and women , although women are not built for monogamy either move on and repeat the process, It's good for the gene pool.

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