Watching pornography would seem to be a vision-intensive task. But new research finds that looking at erotic movies can actually quiet the part of the brain that processes visual stimuli.
Most of the time, watching movies or conducting any other visual task sends extra blood flow to this brain region. Not so when the movies are explicit, the researchers found. Instead, the brain seems to shunt blood — and therefore energy — elsewhere, perhaps to regions of the brain responsible for sexual arousal.
Turns out, the brain may not need to take in all the visual details of a sex scene, said study researcher Gert Holstege, a uroneurologist at the University of Groningen Medical Center in the Netherlands.
"If you look, for example, at your computer and you have to write something or whatever, then you have to look specifically and carefully at what you're doing because if you don't, it means you make mistakes," Holstege told LiveScience. "But the moment you are watching explicit sexual movies, that's not necessary, because you know exactly what's going on. It's not important that the door is green or yellow."
Anxiety vs. arousal
The brain can either be anxious or aroused (or neither), Holstege said, but not both. During orgasm, he has found, activity in brain regions associated with anxiety plummets. This phenomenon may explain why women with low levels of sexual desire often have high levels of anxiety, Holstege said. It makes sense; if you're looking around, focusing on visual details, scanning for danger, it may not be so easy to focus on arousal, he said. [The Sex Quiz: Myths, Taboos and Bizarre Facts]
"If you yourself are in a very dangerous situation, whatever the reason, you don't have sexual feelings, because you have to survive for yourself, not survive for the species," Holstege said.
Brain-scan research had previously turned up hints that explicit sexual images might quiet a brain area called Brodmann's area 17, also called the primary visual cortex, a region that does the first processing of incoming visual information in the brain. The data was spotty, however, and no one had looked into the question in women's brains.
As part of a broader series of brain-scanning studies, Holstege examined the primary visual cortexes of 12 healthy heterosexual premenopausal women. All of the women were on hormonal birth control, smoothing out any menstrual-cycle related changes in sexual desire or arousal.
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