I came across a fascinating review of a new book which tackles the myth of the “cerebral mystique.” In, The Biological Mind: How Brain, Body, and Environment Collaborate to Make Us Who We, neuroscientist Alan Jasanoff challenges the idea that the brain is a mystical computer, and shows us how experiences, emotions, environment, even gut bacteria, alter the shape of human experience.
The body is not merely the brain’s messenger; the body itself is sentient and alive, and constantly sending information to and exchanging information with our minds. Or, as the reviewer explains the concept, “In reality, the brain isn’t a miraculous machine, but…a prism refracting countless internal and external influences.”
While Jasanoff focuses on mental health, he opens a new door to our understanding of sexual health too. One of the theories I’ve been pondering for years (and a focus of my recent eBook, Erotic Awakening), is that sex doesn’t just depend on your brain or your genitals, but that many of the organs between them play important roles.
Your ears and eyes, your senses of smell, taste, and touch, your entire reproductive system and the organs adjacent to them, your nervous system and your bloodstream shape your perceptions and experiences of masturbating, fucking and intimacy. At any given time, if your sensory receptors or organs don’t cooperate to relay positive information to the brain, the yummy feelings fade quickly.
There is little doubt that the brain plays a leading role in sex. Simple example: you can have multiple physical or emotional handicaps, and still have fantastic orgasms. You can be a model of brawny strength and impotent. You can carry a lot of extra weight and have a fantastic sex life. You can be skinny and too depressed to have orgasms. The appearance of the human body doesn’t matter if the brain chemistry is not on your side. Add to this all the individual variations in human health — your health status in general, the kind of food you eat, how much exercise you get, how you were raised, where you live, how you live, who you live with, genetics, and more and you begin to grasp just how many little things have to go right and how many details the brain has to juggle. I’m awestruck by the fact that those things generally do go right.
BUT. The brain’s role is really only as good as the information it is receiving. And sometimes it gets bad information. Gut bacteria apparently have minds of their own, which is kind of scary. And, like the chicken and the egg, we don’t know if the brain talks first to the genitals or if the reproductive system talks first to the brain. Sometimes the brain seems to be taking orders from the genitals!
So, for example, a fear, trauma, or negative experience with your genitals can come back to haunt you as both your organs and your mind conspire inside you. Imagine a conversation between a nervous penis and a judgy brain:
Penis: I’m ready! I’m so ready! SEX! Woo-Hoo!!
Brain: Um, okay, if you say so, but you didn’t get the job done last time
Penis: I can do it! I feel the hormones stirring. I’m gonna give it my best.
Brain: But remember that last time…
Penis: Oh no! Shut up! I’m starting to feel mushy and dead inside.
Brain: So you’re giving up?
Penis: I just don’t like where this is heading now.
Brain: Yep, I see your erection is vanishing. *withdraw hormones, shuts down libido*
Penis: Fuck! I hate you. *shrivels*
Brain: It’s funny how you said “fuck” when you couldn’t even…
In Western medicine, the traditional path to mental wellness has been to concentrate on healing the brain with drugs and therapy. It operates on the principle that if you can get the brain to a better place, the body will follow. As powerful as the brain is, the myth that the brain is the all-knowing computer while organs are basically dumb terminals is a grossly oversimplified explanation for the vast differentials we see in adult personal satisfaction and emotional stability.
Your brain doesn’t drive everything in sex. Your organs are giving directions and helping to steer the wheel.
Our organs have their own lives in our bodies, related to and dependent on the entire system. Your brain doesn’t drive everything in sex. Your organs are giving directions and helping to steer the wheel. Our organs have their own histories and issues. Maybe they even have some kind of primitive sentience. What if your vagina is having a bad day? Does your vagina know, on some primitive level, that it is a bad day, and trigger the process of shutting down brain hormones?
By focusing on the brain alone, I think we’ve totally missed the actual life (or maybe “lives”) within us — the lives that our organs live, and the messages they send the brain. In my experience, focusing on the brain alone can be counter-intuitive to sexual healing too. I’ve seen that happen with sexually traumatized people. They may reach a point where they’ve talked about it so much, they just don’t feel like talking anymore. Yet, while their brain may feel thoroughly explored, the body still isn’t performing up to expectations. For healing to occur, you have to retrain affected areas of your body to send more positive signals to your brain.
My client SaraRose was sexually traumatized by an ex-boyfriend. All the psychiatrists she saw, all the pills she took, and all the dark places in her memory that she explored, didn’t heal her. She still froze up during sexual encounters, even after she had painfully worked on awareness and acceptance of what happened and how it affected her. She was practically an expert on how trauma impairs sexual function in women. Yet, she still could not have orgasms, no matter how impressive her knowledge base. What finally pushed her over the top to a successful sex life was building new muscle memories. I had her experiment with masturbating in new, more relaxing and self-focused ways, and suggested some new, tenderly pleasurable sensations she’d never received from her male lovers. Within a few weeks, she began to have orgasms. Her success at having solo orgasms transformed her ability to have successfully partnered sex. Today, she feels she has largely overcome her sexual trauma, at least enough to have a sex life that she’s can feel good about.
So you can trick your brain into thinking you are having a good time. No surprise, really. There’s evidence that a smiley muscle hack helps reduce depressiveness. “Smiling can trick your brain into happiness” is one of the many articles published about this well-known self-help maneuver, which posits that if you make yourself smile more, and work the smiley muscles, your brain will begin to believe that you have good reason to be smiling. Ultimately, more smiles and laughter will convince your brain that you are happier and healthier than you were before. This is an example of how your brain will take directions from muscles. It also shows that sometimes the body tells the brain what to think. For SaraRose, making her vagina smile convinced her brain that she could have great sex. And so she did.
This kind of internal retraining might also be part of the reason why many adults say that BDSM has been deeply therapeutic to them. New acts, new behaviors, new ways to frame them, and giving our organs (especially our senses and our skin) positive experiences probably promotes healing in the mind as the brain learns new sexual potentials.
I am so looking forward to seeing where this new research will take us in understanding the interconnections between the body and the mind. We know more or less that our organs talk to our brains in a still-mysterious chemical language. It will be amazing to understand whether they also harbor some kind of consciousness that directs and/or misdirects the brain to do its various jobs. Jasanoff has opened the door wide to radical progress in our understanding of the complex organic collaboration that is the human body.
Feel like reading a book now?
  |
  |
