The Brain in Love: 12 Lessons to Enhance Your Love Life (20 page)

Hormones play a significant role in sexual behavior. In the pursuit of treatments for paraphilias, research has shown that a common birth control method in women, Depo Provera, can help. This synthetic hormone decreases sexual desire and helps to tranquilize the brain. It has also been found to act in the temporal lobes and been used to treat epilepsy and rage attacks in men. It does not just lower plasma testosterone levels, implicated in hypersexual behavior; it also acts as a method of calming seizure like activity in the brain. In one case a thirty-eight-year-old man suffered brain damage after falling off his bike. He had no history of mental illness or sexual dysfunction and his wife thought he had been a good problem solver. After the accident, his behavior changed drastically and he began displaying hypersexual tendencies. He harassed his seventeen-year-old stepdaughter and she became the target of his sexual advances. His sexual behavior was related to his epileptic seizures and would occur simultaneous with them. After he received the hormone treatment, he stopped seizing and his sexual problems ceased as well.

Are Sex Offenders Treatable?

The treatment of sex offenders has changed radically in the last decade. What was once considered a hopeless disorder is now thought by some professionals to be treatable in many cases. The goal is to preserve normal sexual interests and behaviors while reducing deviant or paraphilic ones. According to Canadian psychiatrist John Bradford, pharmacological treatments have been shown to decrease the main problem in pedophilia, the preference of children for sexual gratification. Biological treatments, specifically castration and neurosurgery, have been used to treat sexual offenders to reduce their sexual drive and to prevent relapse. The studies of these treatments have reported markedly low recidivism rates, of about 5 percent following long periods of time. These outcome studies help us understand these disorders, which involve excessive response to male hormones, and what to do about it. The biological effects of surgical castration and male hormone suppression by antiandrogens and hormonal agents have the same effect on sexual behavior. In addition, Dr. Bradford has found antiobsessive medications, called SSRIs, which enhance serotonin, to be also helpful in this population.

Dwayne McCallum, a past medical director of a prison in Colorado, has used ideas from my brain-imaging research with sex offenders. He noticed that many of them had ADHD, and treating the disorder decreased their impulsivity and subsequently their recidivistic behavior. He also noted another group of sex offenders who had anterior cingulate gyrus issues (rigid, worried, inflexible, repetitive negative thoughts) that responded better to serotonin-enhancing medications, such as Lexapro. When it comes to sex offenders, most people think like my father, “You should kill all the bastards.” My imaging work and the pioneering work of John Bradford, however, suggests a much more radical approach to them. By scanning and treating the abnormal brain function that many possess, we are likely to decrease subsequent crimes.

Getting Sneaky Thoughts out of Your Mind

As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, we all get sneaky thoughts. Sometimes they turn into trouble. One way to rid yourself of the pesky or irritating thoughts is to play them out to their worst conclusion. Here is a case below from my
Men’s Health
column. One man wrote in with the following question. “I walked in on my sister-in-law while she was changing. Now I can’t stop thinking about her. What do I do?”

I wrote, “If you’re thinking about what might happen the next time you’re alone with your sister-in-law, let that fantasy play out in your mind. But when you do, give it a negative ending. Getting caught by your wife or sister-in-law’s husband is generally a good start, but take the nightmare a step further by imagining the effect this would have on your relationships with other family members as well. It’ll make the whole fantasy less appealing—and allow it to die a natural death. If the thoughts, or even paraphilias and fetishes, cause you distress, use this technique to decrease their frequency.”

Lesson #7: We all get unusual or sneaky thoughts; that is normal. When they get out of control, it may be a sign that the brain needs help
.

THE “OH GOD!” FACTOR

Sex As a Religious Experience

“If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, ‘it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,’ and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then I am sure that Hell … has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct … leaving only Heaven thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting ‘Oh my God.’”

—FROM AN ANONYMOUS SOURCE ON THE INTERNET

G
od usually comes up at least once in the throes of sexual ecstasy. “Oh my God … Please God … God don’t stop …” are not uncommon phrases preceding intense orgasms. On the surface it might seem as though religious ecstasy and sexual pleasure have little in common, besides, of course, calling out God’s name. Looking under the surface, however, reveals some fascinating similarities. Experiences of God and sex are usually enhanced by rituals, music, and candles. Both experiences involve requesting help, if you consider “Oh God please don’t stop” asking for help, and both experiences can be associated with tremendous joy.

In recent years imaging has been used as a tool for brain scientists to look at brain function in relation to religious experience and sexual ecstasy. Researchers have come to learn that behaviors that were seen as vastly different from each other have more in common than once thought. Both peak experiences seem to be processed primarily in the right side of the brain, especially the right temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex. So enhancing one experience may, in fact, help the other. Enhancing right-hemisphere function may enhance both religious and sexual experience.

Is there really evidence to support the connection between religious experience and sexual ecstasy? Sexual ecstasy or orgasmic pleasure appears to involve primarily the right hemisphere. Researchers from the University of Kuopio in Finland used brain-SPECT imaging to study eight healthy right-handed men during orgasm. They found overall decreased blood flow in the brain during orgasm except in right prefrontal cortex, where cerebral blood flow was increased significantly! There are twenty-three cases of temporal lobe epilepsy that are associated with the feeling of having an orgasm, called an orgasmic epileptic aura. Eighty-seven percent of the patients had their abnormality on the right side, especially the right temporal lobe. A study from the Department of Neuroscience at Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, examined eleven patients with epilepsy who reported auras of ecstasy or pleasure. Four had erotic sensations and five described “a religious/spiritual experience.”

Research from the Behavioral Neuroscience Laboratory at Laurentian University in Ontario, Canada, under the direction of Michael Persinger has studied religious experience and the brain for many years. They have reported that religious experience, especially of a sensed presence or being, can be induced by placing a weak magnetic field over the right temporal lobe. Women, who have greater access to the right hemisphere in general, reported more frequent experiences of a sensed presence than did men, and men were more likely than women to consider these experiences as “intrusions” from a negative alien source. Some of
the phenomena generated by the right temporal lobe included “evil entities,” gods, out-of-body experiences, and alterations in space-time.

Neurotheology

Rayford and Jill have both experienced strong religious visions. He was an agnostic and she was a Christian. He thought that the devil was following him; she thought the Blessed Mother appeared to her. Both have temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Like other forms of epilepsy, the condition causes convulsions but it is also associated with religious feelings, sexual ecstasy, and sometimes hallucinations. Research into why people like Rayford and Jill saw what they did has opened up a whole field of brain science: neurotheology.

Several religious figures are thought to have temporal lobe epilepsy. An example is Ellen White, one of the founders of the Seventh Day Adventist Movement born in 1827. She suffered a brain injury at age nine that totally changed her personality and she subsequently started to have powerful religious visions.

Author Fyodor Dostoyevsky was reported to have bouts of “temporal lobe seizures.” He felt his affliction was a “holy experience.” His biographer Rene Fueloep-Miller quotes Dostoyevsky as saying, that his epilepsy “rouses in me hitherto unsuspected emotions, gives me feelings of magnificence, abundance and eternity.” In
The Idiot
, Dostoyevsky offers one of the most nuanced descriptions of the experience:

“There was always one instant just before the epileptic fit … when suddenly in the midst of sadness, spiritual darkness and oppression, his brain seemed momentarily to catch fire, and in an extraordinary rush, all his vital forces were at their highest tension. The sense of life, the consciousness of self, were multiplied almost ten times at these moments which lasted no longer than a flash of lightning. His mind and his heart were flooded with extraordinary light; all his uneasiness, all his doubts, all his
anxieties were relieved at once; they were all resolved in a loft calm, full of serene, harmonious joy and hope, full of reason and ultimate meaning. But these moments, these flashes, were only a premonition of that final second (it was never more than a second) with which the fit began. That second was, of course, unendurable. Thinking of that moment later, when he was well again, he often said to himself that all these gleams and flashes of supreme sensation and consciousness of self, and therefore, also of the highest form of being, were nothing but disease, the violation of the normal state; and if so, it was not at all the highest form of being, but on the contrary must be reckoned the lowest. Yet he came at last to an extreme paradoxical conclusion. ‘What if it is disease?’ he decided at last. ‘What does it matter that it is an abnormal intensity, if the result, if the sensation, remembered and analyzed afterwards in health, turns out to be the acme of harmony and beauty, and gives a feeling, unknown and undivined till then, of completeness, of proportion, of reconciliation, and of startled prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?’”

The brain feels joy and ecstasy. It also feels sadness and pain. Learning how to enhance brain function can enhance all areas of life, even the ones most sacred.

Sacred Sex

Sex can be a sacred act. Being inside another person’s body, becoming one with him or her, allows for the exchange not only of bodily fluids, but also of energy forces, thoughts, and intentions. Sexual union can be a spiritual experience. Many religions of the world discuss sex in a sacred context.

Tantra
(a Sanskrit word which means “woven together”) is a term applied to several schools of Hindu yoga in which sex is worshipped. And tantra has been applied to sexual practices of other religions, including Tibetan Buddhism and Taoism.

Hindu Tantra

Tantra yoga is thought to date back thousands of years. There were rituals, or
pujas
, focusing on sex organs, such as
yoni puja
, a ceremony honoring the vulva, either of a statue or a living woman; and
linga puja
, honoring the penis, often in the form of a natural upright stone. Similar objects of worship have been found among the archaeological remains of many neolithic people around the world, leading some scholars to speculate that “sex worship” in some form or another is humanity’s oldest religion. An Alaskan friend gave me a long, cylindrical carved statue. It was a walrus
ooskis
(penis). He said it symbolized fertility and was a traditional gift given to couples.