Word: stimuli
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Research by Meredith Chivers at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, affiliated with the University of Toronto, shows that women do respond to sexy visual stimuli. In fact, in a study recently presented at a Kinsey Institute conference on female sexuality, Chivers found that women show physical signs of arousal in response to a wider variety of images (including films of bonobo chimps mating) than men do. But unlike in men, this physical arousal is not closely paired with a subjective feeling of being turned on. In short, physical arousal for women can come before or even...
...estrogen trigger desire by stimulating the release of neurotransmitters in the brain. These chemicals are ultimately responsible for our moods, emotions and attitudes. And the most important of 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...
...raised pain thresholds by 40% and that during orgasm women could tolerate up to 110% more pain. But she could not explain the link until the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Using fMRI to view the brains of easily orgasmic women as they climaxed, either with visual stimuli or by self-stimulation, Whipple found that the body's pain-killing center in the midbrain is activated during peak arousal. Signals from this part of the brain instruct the body to release endorphins and corticosteroids, which can temporarily numb the raw nerve endings responsible for everything from menstrual cramps...
...trying to ask is, ‘How does the retina achieve this?’” Dowling explains, and his research thus far has attempted to focus on the circuitry of the retina. He investigates how the individual neurons connect and then respond to light stimuli, recording these as electrical responses...
Reticular formation As the brain's sentry, this structure receives incoming stimuli and puts the brain on alert, ready to respond. Meditating dials back the arousal signal...