How does sexual arousal work? How do humans get aroused by looking at a picture? How does it trigger?
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Humans haven’t evolved out of the mating dance yet. For a hundred million years, there was tremendous pressure to breed and no accurate way to simulate the image of a ready and willing partner. If you saw a sexy specimen in a provocative position, they were definitely real and almost certainly making an invitation. Once your eyes have seen it, your brain predicts the next part and tells the rest of your body to get ready with a rush of hormones, initiating a physical response in the pants region. This specific hardware, linking the sight, scent, sound, taste, or touch of a willing partner to your genitals is some of the oldest, simplest hardware in your brain. It doesn’t know what a photograph is and that you can’t have sex with it.
I really recommend this video (and channel in general!)
[Sexual Arousal, Desire and Attraction: What’s the Difference?](https://youtu.be/E9VG82JA1NQ)
A lot of the info is based off of Emily Nagoski’s book about this called Come As You Are if anyone would like to learn more!
For like a billion years of evolution, there was no such thing as a photograph. Those are the conditions human sexuality evolved in – for literally millions of years the image of a naked female entering your eyes meant that there was an (actual) naked female in front of you. So of course you should get aroused, that’s a potential mating opportunity!
The invention of photos was like a split second ago on the timescale that evolution operates on. It has only been a few human generations that everyone has access to nude photos whenever they want. That’s just WAY too fast for evolution to have reacted to this development, so we’re all still running brain software that says “Alert! Potential mate! She’s right there in front of you dude, try and have sex right now!!”
Humans can imagine themselves doing things without actually doing them. This is one reason why humans are really good at problem solving.
It also allows them to imagine themselves having sex.
You want to make babies it cannot be controlled, only contained…. and most anything sets it off because so much of our time is spent NOT making babies.
Now I have a son and everytime I get laid or have some ‘self care’ , after I finish all I can think about is how sex is to make people…sexual arousal is almost entirely about trying to make life, because life is brutal, especially to the young.
Braincells are a hell of thing. Just thinking about something is almost like experiencing it, without the full hormonal hit. We see something and we think it’s happening… fear, hunger, arousal, even looking at picture of snow.. even if you’ve never seen it will make you brain think.. “maybe it’s cold?”.
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Good question. It’s safe to say we don’t exactly know, or if some neuroscientist does, the knowledge hasn’t spread widely. Keep in mind I’m no expert.
As we can tell by weird fetishes on the internet, they can involve high-level concepts that couldn’t exist in the ancestral environment – transformation, inflation, cartoons, machines, uniforms, etc..
There has been a 2014 [experiment](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3580026/) with rats: put them in a room with a lever spraying salty water directly into their mouth. Unsurprisingly, they dislike the lever, learning to avoid it by association. But make them salt-deprived for the first time in their lives, and put them in the same room, and they go right for the lever.
That’s actually pretty surprising – it can’t be some sort of “hard-coded” instinct, the ancestral environment rats evolved in didn’t involve levers, or any association between being salt-deprived and levers, or anything. But also simple reinforcement learning isn’t what happened – there were zero cases in its lifetime of the rat feeling salt-deprived and knowing that either salt or the lever will help this time rather than hurt. Imitation learning is also excluded by the experimental design.
So animals (including us) must have a way to do such things, that depend on the more “hard-wired” parts of the brain, which innately know things like what saltiness is, or that salt fixes salt-deprivation, being involved in assessing predictions of novel situations with concepts/ideas/symbols that come from the more flexible, learned parts (in us the neocortex), which know things like what levers are and do. Or in other words, even in animals, imagined/non-real stimuli can somehow cause real arousal, and motivate actions.
I’m fascinated by the subject of how Homo Sapiens changed to almost entirely different arousal triggers from the almost universal scent system in other vertebrates and simpler species. Could it be that there was some obscure advantage to there being a much greater female choice involved. Female hyenas are fairly dominant in their packs and have to cooperate if insemination is to be achieved. In Homo, perhaps the bonding affect of courtship has advantages over the rape process that is common in almost all nonhumans.
So what about gays… why am I as a woman so turned on by sexy pictures of other women?
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