How does sexual arousal work? How do humans get aroused by looking at a picture? How does it trigger?
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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.
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