NAc . . . approach behaviors! In a safe, relaxing environment, almost the entire NAc activates approach motivation!
As soon as you move into the third chamber, ultrabright lights turn on and suddenly Iggy Pop is blaring—imagine “Lust for Life” playing at randomly varying volumes, so you can’t even get used to it. Everything about this environment stresses you out. You’re like an introverted bookworm at a bad nightclub. Now when the researchers zap your top NAc, it doesn’t activate curiosity or approach behaviors, as it has in the previous environments; no, in the new, stressful environment, zapping almost anywhere on the NAc generates avoidant, “ What the hell is this? ” behavior.
When I say that perception of sensation is context dependent, this is the deepest sense in which I mean it. I mean that phylogenetically old parts of your brain (your “monkey brain”) can respond in opposite ways, approach or avoidance, depending on the circumstances in which they are functioning. 14 In a safe, comfortable environment, it hardly matters where you stimulate; you’ll activate approach, curiosity, desire . And in a stressful, dangerous environment, it hardly matters where you stimulate; you’ll activate avoidance, anxiety, dread .
“Context changes how your brain responds to sex,” doesn’t just mean, “Set the mood,” like with candles, corsets, and a locked bedroom door. It also means that when you’re in a great sex-positive context, almost everything can activate your curious “What’s this?” desirous approach to sex. And when you’re in a not-so-great context—eitherexternal circumstances or internal brain state—it doesn’t matter how sexy your partner is, how much you love them, or how fancy your underwear is, almost nothing will activate that curious, appreciative, desirous experience.
In chapter 4 I’ll describe the evolutionary reasons for this, but for now just know: It’s completely normal that context changes how you perceive sensations. It’s just how brains work.
Here’s a puzzle:
Merritt, with her sensitive brake, struggled mightily with sex in real life. Yet she had an active sexual imagination and had been both reader and author of erotic fiction for a decade. Her favorite stories to read and to write were gay male BDSM—she jokingly calls it, “Fifty Shades of Gay.” There just seemed to be something about the idea of two men tangled in an intense power dynamic that really captured her erotic imagination.
“Getting turned on by stories about two men having kinky sex, but being so easily shut down during sex with the woman I love? How does that make sense? A noise. A fingernail when I’m not expecting it. A stray thought, even. And yet I spend hours every day writing about men having sex in public or on a rack or tied to trees.”
Learning about her sexual brake helped some, but it was when she and Carol talked about context—What contexts arouse you? What contexts hit the brakes?—that they discovered that fantasies were great for Merritt, while real life was . . . a challenge.
Which makes lots of sense for a woman with a sensitive brake. The context—external circumstances and internal brain state—of a fantasy is very different from the context of real life. When you’re alone in bed fantasizing about being dominated by five big, unknown men, you are actually safe, there is no threat to activate your stress response, and the novelty of the fantasy adds fuel to the fire. Great context!
But if in real life you were surrounded by five big, unknown men, your brain would probably react with a stress response—Run! Fight! or Freeze!—and that stress response would most likely hit your sexual brakes. Not a great context.
“So what do we do about that?” Merritt asked me.
“Trust,” I said. “Letting go of the brake is about trust.”
Merritt shook her head and looked at Carol. “I trust you one hundred fifty percent. I’d jump off a cliff blindfolded if
As soon as you move into the third chamber, ultrabright lights turn on and suddenly Iggy Pop is blaring—imagine “Lust for Life” playing at randomly varying volumes, so you can’t even get used to it. Everything about this environment stresses you out. You’re like an introverted bookworm at a bad nightclub. Now when the researchers zap your top NAc, it doesn’t activate curiosity or approach behaviors, as it has in the previous environments; no, in the new, stressful environment, zapping almost anywhere on the NAc generates avoidant, “ What the hell is this? ” behavior.
When I say that perception of sensation is context dependent, this is the deepest sense in which I mean it. I mean that phylogenetically old parts of your brain (your “monkey brain”) can respond in opposite ways, approach or avoidance, depending on the circumstances in which they are functioning. 14 In a safe, comfortable environment, it hardly matters where you stimulate; you’ll activate approach, curiosity, desire . And in a stressful, dangerous environment, it hardly matters where you stimulate; you’ll activate avoidance, anxiety, dread .
“Context changes how your brain responds to sex,” doesn’t just mean, “Set the mood,” like with candles, corsets, and a locked bedroom door. It also means that when you’re in a great sex-positive context, almost everything can activate your curious “What’s this?” desirous approach to sex. And when you’re in a not-so-great context—eitherexternal circumstances or internal brain state—it doesn’t matter how sexy your partner is, how much you love them, or how fancy your underwear is, almost nothing will activate that curious, appreciative, desirous experience.
In chapter 4 I’ll describe the evolutionary reasons for this, but for now just know: It’s completely normal that context changes how you perceive sensations. It’s just how brains work.
Here’s a puzzle:
Merritt, with her sensitive brake, struggled mightily with sex in real life. Yet she had an active sexual imagination and had been both reader and author of erotic fiction for a decade. Her favorite stories to read and to write were gay male BDSM—she jokingly calls it, “Fifty Shades of Gay.” There just seemed to be something about the idea of two men tangled in an intense power dynamic that really captured her erotic imagination.
“Getting turned on by stories about two men having kinky sex, but being so easily shut down during sex with the woman I love? How does that make sense? A noise. A fingernail when I’m not expecting it. A stray thought, even. And yet I spend hours every day writing about men having sex in public or on a rack or tied to trees.”
Learning about her sexual brake helped some, but it was when she and Carol talked about context—What contexts arouse you? What contexts hit the brakes?—that they discovered that fantasies were great for Merritt, while real life was . . . a challenge.
Which makes lots of sense for a woman with a sensitive brake. The context—external circumstances and internal brain state—of a fantasy is very different from the context of real life. When you’re alone in bed fantasizing about being dominated by five big, unknown men, you are actually safe, there is no threat to activate your stress response, and the novelty of the fantasy adds fuel to the fire. Great context!
But if in real life you were surrounded by five big, unknown men, your brain would probably react with a stress response—Run! Fight! or Freeze!—and that stress response would most likely hit your sexual brakes. Not a great context.
“So what do we do about that?” Merritt asked me.
“Trust,” I said. “Letting go of the brake is about trust.”
Merritt shook her head and looked at Carol. “I trust you one hundred fifty percent. I’d jump off a cliff blindfolded if
Similar Books
