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You can turn off sexual desire

 
, medical expert
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
 
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29 December 2016, 09:00

The research team stated that it is possible to control a person's sexual desire, for this, only stimulation of certain areas of the brain by magnetic fields is needed. The new work has brought together researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California, and experts are confident that they have found a way to "turn on" and "turn off" sexual desire without affecting the brain itself.

As a basis, experts took transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is used in medicine to treat various disorders. This noninvasive method of stimulating the cerebral cortex with the help of gentle magnetic impulses is absolutely painless, in addition, it allows controlling the level of dopamine - the hormone responsible for the psychoemotional state of a person.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation is used for various mental disorders, cerebral vascular diseases, traumatic spinal cord injuries, etc.

In the course of their work, scientists checked whether transcranial magnetic stimulation would help control a man's sex drive. In the experiment, 20 people took part, each with a traditional sexual orientation and had at least 2 sexual partners in the last year.

Initially, the researchers worked on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain directly responsible for remuneration.

With the help of magnetic pulses, the work of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was suppressed or intensified. On the sexual organs of the experiment participants, special stimulants were fixed, which signaled in the event that a person managed to press the button after the appearance of a certain picture in front of the eyes.

After studying the change in alpha waves with an electroencephalogram, American scientists concluded that stimulation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex increases the excitement of participants, and suppression, on the contrary, reduced sexual desire. It was interesting that stimulation affected the sexual life of participants for several days after the end of the experiment, but if volunteers were offered a monetary reward instead of sexual stimulation, then no similar effect was observed.

Another interesting study in the field of sex was the work of Canadian specialists who found that the memory of a woman depends on her sexual life. The experiment involved 78 women who answered special questions to help determine the ability to remember new information, including memory for abstract words and face recognition. 

As a result, it turned out that women with an active sex life had better memory, in comparison with less active representatives of the weaker sex. Women who have had sex often remember better abstract words and scientists attribute this to the influence of sexual contact on a part of the brain that regulates the work of the nervous system, emotions and memory. After vaginal sex in this part of the brain, the nervous tissue grows actively, which helps strengthen memory. Experts suggest that this feature is associated with physical activity in a woman during sex and a reduction in stress after orgasm.

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