Men get more excited by sexual images

Mar 24, 2010

<b>Grain of science</b><br>A team of scientists discovered another difference in the way men and women relate. According to the results of a brain scanning research project, women and men can say they are thinking the same thing, but the unconscious mind is processing different information.

Grain of science
A team of scientists discovered another difference in the way men and women relate. According to the results of a brain scanning research project, women and men can say they are thinking the same thing, but the unconscious mind is processing different information.

According to a Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience study led by Emory University psychologists Stephan Hamann and Kim Wallen, the emotion control centre of the brain, the amygdala, shows significantly higher levels of activation when males are viewing sexual visual stimuli than when females are viewing the same images.

The findings demonstrate how men and women process visual sexual stimuli differently, and it may explain gender variations in reproductive behaviour.

In the study, 14 male and 14 female participants viewed several types of sexual and social interaction images for 30 minutes. Their brain activity was compared using functional magnetic resonance imaging, a technology that measures neural firing through changes in blood flow.

The scans revealed higher levels of activation in the amygdala, which controls emotion and motivation, in the brains of male subjects compared to the females, despite the fact that both expressed similar subjective assessments of their levels of arousal after viewing the images.

Hamann and Wallen had selected images that were equally arousing to both sexes.

“We discovered the male brain processes visual sexual cues differently.” The scientists’ discovery is consistent with an evolutionary theory that natural selection spurred the development of different sexual behaviours in males and females.

The findings potentially could have applications that could help scientists develop therapeutic measures to help people overcome sexual addictions and other dysfunctions, he says.

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