The brain—as every psychobabble and (as you are seeing) thinking-skills aficionado is sure to remind you eventually—is arguably our major sex organ. So it should be no surprise that sex is never far removed from our thoughts. Which is amazing, since, as one scientist has noted, nobody is ever known to have died from a lack of it.

How far removed?

Well, that’s been a lively sex-on-the-brain issue lately. An online polling company (not to be confused with “a major scientific research institute”) has claimed that a typical male thinks about having sexual intercourse (not to be confused with a hug or a handshake) an average of 13 times a day, or about 5,000 times per year. A typical female? Only five times daily, or about 2,000 times per year. On average, how often do men actually have sex? About twice a week, this outfit reports.

One reason women don’t have more of it may be due to what often seems to be foremost on their mind when they do think about having sex. Condoms.

Men’s issue bloggers know to expect a deluge of comment any time they mention the “c” word. One frustrated respondent wrote, “Picture wrapping your vagina in a Walmart bag before sex, and you’ll have some idea of how condoms can feel at their worst.” One comment about condoms is sure to followed by another, not infrequently from a woman reader. The above male comment prompted this female comment, “I mean, couldn’t I at least wrap my you-know in a bag from, say… IKEA?” Another shared, “Oddly enough, the biggest condom whiners I’ve ever been with both had STDs that could’ve been prevented if they’d wrapped up their junk.”

How big an issue is it to get a condom on a male when the lovers aren’t in a long-term, committed relationship? This devilishly clever, potentially offensive (so be warned!) piece of French graffiti animation about AIDS prevention probably offers a solid clue.

All of which is to observe that the subject of sex and the brain is as controversial as ever. But that’s not to say that we aren’t beginning to clarify some important matters:

Good sex (and good jazz) requires the prefrontal cortex to take a powder.
Specifically, the left lateral orbitofrontal and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortexes. The former policies self-control over basic drives like sex. The latter can lead to a suspension of judgment and reflection. Diminish both their outputs, and you can apparently liberate the libido. Brain imaging studies show deactivation of the same areas of the brain in jazz musicians. Ergo, good sex is really a zonked-out brain improvisating! The “play” question then becomes do you screw or do you riff?

Don’t hug the lug unless you are serious, sister!
Why not? The Big O’s. Oxytocin and the ovaries. One expert has issued this caution to women: “The effects of oxytocin can be incredibly disarming to a woman. Female animals injected with the stuff seem to throw caution to the wind and cuddle up with the first available male. And that is why, when women ask me for advice about men, I warn them, ‘Don’t hug the guy unless you plan to trust him.’” The ovaries produce testosterone. One woman with “arousal dysfunction” joined a scientific trial where some participants wore a testosterone patch. She blamed the patch when she suddenly had a desire to throw herself into the arms of a cousin at a funeral. The problem? Her patch was a placebo. The testosterone was of her own making.*

The Mars versus Venus thing is a brain issue.
Bestselling author John Gray was on the right track: men and women are from different planets. Their brains, that is. And the list of male-female brain differences is growing ever longer. Researchers are astonished that this hasn’t been realized sooner. But then most test subjects—human or animal—have been male. For example, only now are we realizing that women get better pain relief from the opioid painkiller nalbuphine and men from morphine. “It’s scandalous,” one Canadian researcher says. “Women are the most common pain sufferers, and yet our model for basic pain research is the male rat.” Often, men don’t understand brain differences as they affect sex, either. Therapists still marvel at how quickly the male brain can begin to suspect that its female partner is having an affair if she’s just not in the mood. (After all, if she doesn’t want sex with him, it must be because she’s getting it somewhere else.)

Forget the G spot. Think B spot.
This just in!!! A new study of 1,800 women at King’s College, London, suggests that the legendary G spot (a supposedly bean-sized vaginal area said to be the female body’s prime erogenous zone) is a myth. But never mind. Dr. Daniel Amen is a clinical psychologist and brain-imaging junkie. He wants to show you some pitchers. (No, not dirty ones.) Pictures that suggest that the right temporal lobe—Amen’s B spot—is “the seat of orgasms.” (You can learn more in his book, Sex on the Brain: 12 Lessons To Enhance Your Love Life.) The B spot, the good doc says, is what can make love dangerous. He likes to talk about former astronaut Lisa Nowak. She donned adult diapers so she could drive hundreds of miles nonstop to confront a romantic rival. Amen thinks going into space may have affected her B spot!

The brain just can’t let the subject go.
And I’m not even going near the sex-on-the-brain problems of Tiger Woods, John Edwards, Mark Sanford, David Vitter or Elliot Spitzer. Instead, I’m going to talk about the compulsions of the Christian housewife who blogs at “Beyond the Pale.” On Dec. 16, she asked, “Is there sex in heaven?” Jesus never said never, she noted. Good thing, too. “[If] he’d flat-out said, ‘Well, kids, tough break, but no one will be gettin’ wichoo in heaven,’ all kinds of sex-crazed flaky goobers like me would say, ‘Seriously?…. Lemme get back to you on that salvation thing, Jesus…….’” On Jan. 13, she was back with “More sex in heaven.” Reassuring her readers that going to heaven doesn’t mean you are going to end up being a “little Hindu floaty thing.” Good thing, too. She said, “[If] MB wants to be a floaty thing in heaven, I am going to be royally pissed. I need the feel of his arms available for me forever.” MB is her husband.  (”My Beloved.”)

But I can’t be all serious all the time about the subject of Valentine’s Day and sex-on-the-brain. I have to tell you one joke.

U.S. President Calvin Coolidge and his wife are visiting a poultry farm.

During the tour, Mrs. Coolidge inquires of the farmer how his farm has managed to produce so many fertile eggs with so few roosters. The farmer proudly explains that his roosters perform their duty dozens of times each day.

“Perhaps you could point that out to Mr. Coolidge,” pointedly replies the First Lady.

The President, overhearing the remark, asks the farmer, “Does each rooster service the same hen each time?”

“No,” replies the farmer, “there are many hens for each rooster.”

“Perhaps you could point that out to Mrs. Coolidge,” replies the President.

I don’t know whether President and Mrs. Coolidge ever actually visited a poultry farm or had such a conversation with its owner. But the Coolidge Effect—named after the joke—is real. Human males who ejaculate ususally can’t have sex with the same female without a rest. But if a different female enters the picture (and the room) right away … well, hello, Mr. President! More physical and emotional complications in the ever-winding road that has emerged to keep our species around.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

_________
*Actually, as one neuropsychologist has explained, the sex-on-the-female-brain thing is a bit more complicated. Let’s say a woman spots someone interesting. The picture travels the lateral geniculate nucleus to her visual cortex, which evaluates the “mate potential.” If it’s a go, the news is sent to the signal-boosting amygdala, which passes the spark to the hormone-controlling hypothalamus. The word next goes to the ovaries, for a release of testosterone. That’s when the left lateral orbitofrontal and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex get involved, shutting down inhibitions, judgment and reflection. Or something like that. At least when it’s a male being eyed by the female.

What she does is seemingly effortless and done with near-endless patience and faith that a non-train-wreck outcome is always possible with the little guy if you’ll just use your smarts and hang in there a little longer.

When it appears that the excrement is about to hit the fan with him, she turns into a micromanager in a very good sense. If he’s out of control, she goes to work on getting him focused. If he’s overly focused, she encourages him to light up. If he can’t see the forest for the trees, she helps him understand the consequences of going tree-less. If things are looking overwhelmingly negative for him, she moves swiftly to rearranges his environment so that it may not be necessary for him to look from that vantage point at all.

If there was a centerpiece of a principle or technique in her formidable child management skills, for the longest I couldn’t see exactly what it was. But on this trip the aha! arrived. I can now see that in his presence this boy’s grandmother is doing a deliberate brain change thing as surely as neutrons have synapses! She causes his brain to change its moods almost on (her) demand. And when you change the mood of a homo sapiens, you almost guarantee a change in what an individual is likely to do—what she or he is capable of doing—next.

Now, this is not a new idea. For example, creativity, high performance and stress prevention consultants have long espoused the merits of Be Happy moods for opening the mind to new ideas and wider perspectives and more propitious problem-solving outcomes. What’s now happening is that neuroscientists are beginning to zero in on the brain mechanics of such mood changes.

In fact, you may have noticed that a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences just before Christmas got a lot of media ink. Researchers at the University of Toronto announced new data that suggests that our mood affects the way we process information. Think of your attention as like a spotlight, say these researchers. A good mood will widen that spotlight—you can see a lot more (and if you aren’t careful you may see too much!). Conversely, a negative mood tightens your focus and makes you focus acutely on certain specifics (and that can easily be detrimental if you need to be observing a lot of things at once).

In terms of brain parts, one researcher, Dr. Robert Maurer at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, says suspicions fall heavily on the mid-brain’s amygdala. “The amygdala triggers fear, and fear can shut down the part of the brain that makes you creative. When you are happy, the amygdala is quiet….”

Here, then, are two hugely important cycles for our brain:
Overheated amygdala = fear = negative moods = sharper focus = (potentially) tunnel vision.
Well-cooled amygdala = pleasure = positive moods = wide-beam attention = (potentially) observing too much or too little attentively.

In addition to explaining my grandson’s grandmother’s skills at influencing his behaviors, I strongly suspect that the consequences of these two brain cycles are being writ large all around us on an almost daily basis.

For example, in my metro area of North Texas, we have a suburb named Farmers Branch. It has a mayor and city council that have declared war on “illegal aliens”—mostly immigrants from South and Central America who are in the U.S. without authority. The latest move of the city fathers and mothers is a law outlawing the rental of apartments to anyone who can’t prove legal immigrant status. Apparently, the town’s politicians passed the law without giving much if any thought to what the full range of results of such a law would be, and even before it goes into effect, the law is threatening to tear the town apart. What led to all this? I’d suggest there were a lot of overheated amygdalas in Farmers Branch, and now there are more than ever.

The same thing happened nationally with 9/11. Not in our lifetime have so many amygdalas in this country become so quickly overheated. And because the resulting tunnel so completely swallowed our ability to envision consequences and nuances, our national identify and well-being in America continue to be at risk from inactivity or proactive measures of an inept or ill-targeted kind.

But things may not be quite as bad as they were. Amygdalas may be cooling. Otherwise, we would not have seen the national election results of Nov. 7. And the author of the current No. 1 New York Times non-fiction bestseller, a book called The Audacity of Hope, would not have emerged as a serious potential presidential candidate almost overnight. And former presidential counselor Bill Moyers almost certainly would not have uttered these words a few weeks ago to a blue-chip audience of progressives in New York:

“We have a story of … power. It is that the promise of America leaves no one out. Go now, and tell it on the mountains. From the rooftops, tell it. From your laptops, tell it. From the street corners and from Starbucks, tell it. Tell it at the synagogue, sanctuary and mosque. Tell it where you can, when you can and while you can—to every candidate for office, to every talk-show host and pundit, to corporate executives and schoolchildren. Tell it—for America’s sake.”

The brain simply can’t conjure those kinds of words, or sit in approving reception of them, with overheated amygdalas. No more than Sherry’s and my grandson can easily see the wisdom of doing something different when his amygdala is overwrought. May the amygdalas of America continue to cool for some time to come. For the world’s sake.

Read about the University of Toronto’s and other researchers’ findings about moods and attention here: Happy Emotions Boost Creativity

Read the first chapter of U.S. Senator Barak Obama’s book here [registration may be required]:
The Audacity of Hope

Read an adaptation of Bill Moyers’ Dec. 12 remarks to a New York event sponsored by The Nation, Demos, the Brennan Center for Justice and the New Democracy project here:
For America’s Sake

But like so many other gorgeous, evocative, instructive, illuminating discoveries, the idea of the triune brain has not always stood the test of further, better scientific inquiry all that well. The problem mainly is that the roles of the trio of brains are not nearly as independent as Dr. MacLean had thought. What is going on in the general neighborhood of one of Paul MacLean’s trio of brains is often having an outsized influence over what is going on in other brain areas.

But the idea that the brain has separate “processing” areas that don’t cooperate well—that’s a MacLean idea that has stood the test of time.

For example, the region where MacLean located his middle (primordial) brain contains a little almond-shaped organ called the amygdala. It turns out that the amygdala has a mind of its own. That is, it can learn—reason?— independent of the (higher) cortex. Moreover, the means that the amygdala and the cortex have for communicating what each “is thinking” are imperfect at this point in our evolving capabilities, and that creates endless trouble for us.

For non-brain-scientists (me, for one), no one whom I know about has offered better, clearer explanations of all this than Joseph LeDoux at New York University’s Center for Neural Science. In Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, Dr. LeDoux suggests that the reason why the all-important amygdala can’t “talk” well with its higher-up synapses is because the wires leading there aren’t well enough developed. And the reason for that is because the development of language by humans required so much space and so many connections to pull off. Consequently, the cognitive systems in our heads have inordinate trouble communicating with the emotional and motivational systems, and vice versa.

Writes Dr. LeDoux, “This is why a brilliant mathematician or artist, or a successful entrepreneur, can like anyone else fall victim to sexual seduction, road rage, or jealousy, or be a child abuser or rapist, or have crippling depression or anxiety….Doing the right thing doesn’t always flow naturally from knowing what the right thing to do is.”

The trilogy of brain functions that LeDoux finds most compelling are indeed those governing thoughts, emotions and motivations. If this triune grouping breaks down, he writes, “the self is likely to begin to disintegrate and mental health to deteriorate. When thoughts are radically dissociated from emotions and motivations, as in schizophrenia, personality can, in fact, change drastically. When emotions run wild, as in anxiety disorders or depression, a person is no longer the person he or she once was. And when motivations are subjugated by drug addiction, the emotional and intellectual aspects of life suffer.”

In short, Dr. LeDoux says that the self is synaptic: “You are your synapses.” Meaning that what happens between key parts of the brain—or doesn’t happen—can be all-important and all-defining. On this point, Dr. MacLean would most likely have been in full agreement.

See here for order info for Dr. LeDoux’s book: “Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are”