Word: heiman
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...reasons for that difference may be as much cultural as they are physiological. Dr. Julia Heiman, a psychologist and director of the Reproductive and Sexual Medicine Clinic at the University of Washington Medical School, is one of a growing number of researchers who think it's misguided to see men as simple and linear and women as complex and circular. "I don't think we've taken the time to talk to men about what desire is," she says. "If they are emotional about their sexuality, they don't feel in step with other...
...these for the feeling we call desire seems to be dopamine. Dopamine is at least partly responsible for making external stimuli arousing (among other things, it's thought to be the pleasure-triggering substance underlying drug addiction). "Being low on dopamine," says the University of Washington Medical School's Heiman, "correlates with being low on desire." And in men dopamine-enhancing drugs (including some antidepressants and anti-Parkinson's medications) can increase desire and erections. So can apomorphine, a Parkinson's drug that latches directly onto the dopamine receptors in brain cells and turns them...
Another neurotransmitter almost certainly involved in the biochemistry of desire is serotonin, which, like dopamine, plays a role in feelings of satisfaction. Antidepressants like Prozac, which enhance mood by keeping serotonin in circulation longer than usual, can paradoxically depress the ability to achieve orgasm. But "dopamine and serotonin," says Heiman, "appear to interact with each other in a complicated way to impact desire...