Neuroscience
From Dr Gerry Quinn: Dynamic Visual Noise
You can't see them here, because the authors exploited the phenomenon of binocular rivalry to present different images to each eye separately. Specifically, dynamic visual noise and nude male or female images were presented to each eye simultaneously. The visual noise in one eye suppresses the naked body in the other, making its perception unconscious.
Continuing in the sexy series of gay/straight/male/female studies,
- Male-to-female Transsexuals Have "male" Brains
People with "gender dysphoria" feel as though their sexual identity doesn't match their biological sex. A popular theory is that such people have a brain with physical characteristics that match the sex they identify with. So, for a man who feels...
- How Messages Are Scent
The idea that humans release chemical signals – pheromones – that affect people around them is controversial. If pheromones do exist, however, two chemicals that might fulfil this role are the testosterone derivative 4,16-androstadien-3-one (AND),...
- Are You Thinking What I Say You're Thinking?
The idea that your brain contains information that ‘you’ cannot access is, of course, not new – Freud wrote about that years ago; and neither is it an unfamiliar phenomenon in our everyday lives – how often do we struggle to find a word that we...
- Pleasure Or Pain?
Robert Mapplethorpe - Untitled (Self Portrait) The previous post (Erotic or Disgusting?) covered a functional MRI experiment on the neural responses to erotic films in heterosexual and homosexual males (Zhang et al., 2010). Specifically, the study examined...
- Sweat, Urine, And Sexual Orientation
Sexual Orientation May Affect Brain Response to Human Pheromones By Miranda Hitti WebMD Medical News Reviewed By Louise Chang, MD on Monday, May 08, 2006 May 8, 2006 -- Lesbian women and heterosexual women respond differently...
Neuroscience
Invisible Nudes?
From Dr Gerry Quinn: Dynamic Visual Noise
You can't see them here, because the authors exploited the phenomenon of binocular rivalry to present different images to each eye separately. Specifically, dynamic visual noise and nude male or female images were presented to each eye simultaneously. The visual noise in one eye suppresses the naked body in the other, making its perception unconscious.
Continuing in the sexy series of gay/straight/male/female studies,
Erotica Entices Even When InvisibleThe paper was supposedly published online yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, but it's nowhere to be found. We'll just have to make do with LiveScience.com for now.
By Ker Than
. . .
In an experiment, 40 men and women were shown erotic images that had been manipulated to bypass conscious detection. The participants consisted of both heterosexual and homosexual individuals.
Subjects were then shown a small "probe" pattern and asked to determine its orientation -- clockwise or counterclockwise. The researchers found that subjects identified the probe pattern more accurately when it appeared where the erotic images had been, suggesting that the invisible images exerted an effect on their spatial attentions.
In general, the erotic images attracted or repelled attention depending on the gender of the nude model and also the sexual orientation of the subject. For example, heterosexual males tended to perform better on the pattern task when it followed the presentation of an invisible female nude than a male nude. Gay males, in contrast, showed more enhanced performance when exposed to invisible male nudes compared to female nudes.
. . .
For women, the results were more mixed. Heterosexual females performed better after exposure to invisible male nudes, but their performance didn't necessarily worsen when exposed to female nudes. [NOTE: that doesn't sound like "repels."]
The performances of homosexual and bisexual females were somewhere in-between heterosexual male and heterosexual female groups.
- Male-to-female Transsexuals Have "male" Brains
People with "gender dysphoria" feel as though their sexual identity doesn't match their biological sex. A popular theory is that such people have a brain with physical characteristics that match the sex they identify with. So, for a man who feels...
- How Messages Are Scent
The idea that humans release chemical signals – pheromones – that affect people around them is controversial. If pheromones do exist, however, two chemicals that might fulfil this role are the testosterone derivative 4,16-androstadien-3-one (AND),...
- Are You Thinking What I Say You're Thinking?
The idea that your brain contains information that ‘you’ cannot access is, of course, not new – Freud wrote about that years ago; and neither is it an unfamiliar phenomenon in our everyday lives – how often do we struggle to find a word that we...
- Pleasure Or Pain?
Robert Mapplethorpe - Untitled (Self Portrait) The previous post (Erotic or Disgusting?) covered a functional MRI experiment on the neural responses to erotic films in heterosexual and homosexual males (Zhang et al., 2010). Specifically, the study examined...
- Sweat, Urine, And Sexual Orientation
Sexual Orientation May Affect Brain Response to Human Pheromones By Miranda Hitti WebMD Medical News Reviewed By Louise Chang, MD on Monday, May 08, 2006 May 8, 2006 -- Lesbian women and heterosexual women respond differently...