Debra Black
Staff Reporter
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/...reveal-new-regions-of-sexual-stimulation?bn=1
For the first time, the stimulation of the vagina, cervix and clitoris are shown to activate three separate regions in the sensory cortex of a woman’s brain.
The discovery comes from Barry Komisaruk, a psychology professor at Rutgers University, who has spent considerable time mapping the brain and how it is activated during sexual stimulation and orgasm. Komisaruk and his team recently presented an animated video of a woman’s brain as she reaches orgasm using brain scan images.
In a study published earlier this year in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, Komisaruk was able to map a series of women’s brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging to see whether or not stimulation of the vagina and cervix would activate any regions of the brain.
Eleven women, ages 23-56, participated in the study and had their brains mapped as they engaged in self-stimulation.
The sensory regions of the brain were first mapped by Montreal neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield in the 1950s on male epilepsy patients. It was called the sensory homunculus and detailed a man’s body parts and their corresponding sensory regions in the brain.
What Komisaruk found changes the way many think about the way women are sexually stimulated and how it affects their brains.
Many sex experts have said and believed that genital stimulation came from the stimulation of the clitoris as compared to the vagina and cervix.
“What we show is that each of those three regions produce a significant sensory input to the cortex,” explained Komisaruk.
“There had been some controversy in the literature as to whether the vagina and cervix produce a sensory response,” he said. “This is clear evidence they do.”
“This was a big surprise to my male neuroscience colleagues because it violates the classical view of the sensory mapping of the body.”
Another unexpected result of the study was that nipple stimulation not only shows up in the chest area of the brain, but also in the genital area.
This could explain why nipple or breast stimulation is erotic, said Komisaruk.
The study is “clear evidence that there is a sensory response from the vagina and cervix” — something many have denied.
The parts of the brain that are activated when the vagina and cervix are stimulated are very near the spot in the brain which is activated when a woman’s clitoris is stimulated.
“They’re clustered together like three grapes,” said Komisaruk. “They each have a distinct projection zone and clearly are different from each other yet clustered together in the sensory cortex.”
And they are in the same general area of the sensory cortex which is stimulated in a man when his genitals are stimulated, he said.
Komisaruk and others believe that by understanding how stimulation of different female genital regions effect the brain and how they interrelate will help researchers understand women’s sexuality and perhaps provide answers to sexual dysfunction.
