The science section of the NYT last week (see here, for example) was principally devoted to research on sexual and romantic desire. According to the article, there has been some debate over whether physiological arousal proceeds or follows sexual desire, and the suggestion is that recent research supports the former view. I suspect a lot will probably turn on what one means by "desire" and that the discussion could benefit from some more conceptual clarity. In any event, here's the pertinent excerpt which attempts to connect the issue to broader issues in neuroethics:
A plethora of new findings, however, suggest that the experience of desire may be less a forerunner to sex than an afterthought, the cognitive overlay that the brain gives to the sensation of already having been aroused by some sort of physical or subliminal stimulus — a brush on the back of the neck, say, or the sight of a ripe apple, or wearing a hard hat on a construction site and being surrounded by other men in similar haberdashery.
In a series of studies at the University of Amsterdam, Ellen Laan, Stephanie Both and Mark Spiering demonstrated that the body’s entire motor system is activated almost instantly by exposure to sexual images, and that the more intensely sexual the visuals, the stronger the electric signals emitted by the participants’ so-called spinal tendious reflexes. By the looks of it, Dr. Laan said, the body is primed for sex before the mind has had a moment to leer.
“We think that sexual desire emerges from sexual stimulation, the activation of one’s sexual system,” she said in a telephone interview.
Moreover, she said, arousal is not necessarily a conscious process. In other experiments, Dr. Spiering and his colleagues showed that when college students were exposed to sexual images too fleetingly for the subjects to report having noticed them, the participants were nevertheless much quicker to identify subsequent sexual images than were the control students who had been flashed with neutral images.
“Our sexual responsiveness can be activated or enhanced by stimuli we’re not even aware of,” Dr. Laan said.
By reordering the sexual timeline and placing desire after arousal, rather than vice versa, the new research fits into the pattern that neurobiologists have lately observed for other areas of life. Before we are conscious of wanting to do anything — wave at a friend, open a book — the brain regions needed to perform the activity are already ablaze. The notion that any of us is the Decider, the proactive plotter of our most lubricious desires, scientists say, may simply be a happy and perhaps necessary illusion.
A unique illusion: one nobody actually suffers from. Noone believes that we decide to have our desires.
Posted by: Neil | 04/16/2007 at 09:27 AM
A unique illusion: one nobody actually suffers from. Noone believes that we decide to have our desires.
Posted by: Neil | 04/16/2007 at 09:29 AM