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Your brain is running your love life |
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Written by Alison Roberts, asap
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Tuesday, 15 May 2007 |
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Size does matter after all when it comes to sexual satisfaction, according to Dr. Daniel Amen.
Forget those enlargement offers in your e-mail inbox: We're talking about the Big B — the Brain.
"In order to have a great sex life, you have to have a great brain," Amen says during a phone interview from Newport Beach, Calif., where he lives.
Brain greatness, he explains, requires avoiding activities that can literally shrink the brain, including abusing drugs and alcohol.
Amen is a clinical psychiatrist and brain-imaging expert who also brings a single guy's interest to the topic.
"I like to look, that's all I can say," he says, savoring the double-entendre of expressing his love of the view inside the skull. Since 1989, he has opened four Amen Clinics, including one in Fairfield, where brain scans are key to evaluation. (You can check out hundreds of brain scans and more at www.amenclinic.com.)
Drawing on his work, Amen has written books about dealing with such hardships as Alzheimer's disease, anxiety, depression and attention deficit disorder.
His latest book, "Sex on the Brain: 12 Lessons To Enhance Your Love Life" (Harmony Books, $24, 278 pages), falls into his growing catalog of writing about how to enhance the good life, as author of the "Head Check" column in Men's Health magazine and in books such as "Change Your Brain, Change Your Life" and "Making a Good Brain Great."
"It just seemed like nobody was putting the brain right in the middle of our sex lives," Amen says.
The way he looks at it, sex largely occurs in your brain. Specifically, it appears that the right temporal lobe may be called the B Spot, the part of the brain that is "the seat of orgasms."
Amen's interest in his latest topic is more than just professional.
"In large part, I did this book for me; there's a lot of me in it," he says.
Amen is 52, and the way to his heart is definitely through his brain.
"I'm just always looking for the perfect brain," he says. "If I date someone long enough, they get scanned."
His daughters — who are 19, 24 and 30 years old — are used to Daddy offering to scan their dates. Such scans, he writes, provide telling information, akin to "meeting someone's parents or taking them on vacation."
He feels pretty good about his own brain's sex appeal.
"At 52, my brain is better than it was at 37," Amen says.
His experiences of the heart — or perhaps we should say love lobe — have given him a particular empathy for those who have been buffeted by the stormy seas of love. "I have been in love four times," he says.
Amen's tone of sympathy is clear when he talks about Lisa Nowak, the one-time NASA astronaut whose behavior went stratospherically bizarre when she donned adult diapers and drove hundreds of miles to confront a romantic rival.
"I so get why she did what she did," he says. "I don't know if you have ever had your heart broken; it so sucks."
He has avoided such a fate "only by the grace of God and better frontal lobes," he adds.
Love, he says is a drug, and Nowak basically went on a bad trip.
Amen, who like most of us only knows of Nowak's case by news accounts, says that going into outer space may actually have changed her brain physically in ways that contributed to her spaced-out behavior.
He says evaluating the brain's physical condition can provide relationship-saving clues. He recounts one case where a husband suddenly turned into a colossal jerk, which almost led to divorce. Brain imaging uncovered evidence that the man was suffering brain damage from chemical exposure on the job. Once the exposure was stopped, his brain's health — and his marital happiness — were restored.
The moral of such stories, Amen says, is that taking care of your brain physically is key to a satisfying romantic life. Like your body, your brain's good health requires aerobic exercise, a healthy diet and avoidance of harmful chemicals, including too much alcohol and caffeine.
A recent study found that drinking alcohol — whether heavily or moderately — is associated with shrinkage of the brain. A causal link hasn't been established, and the cognitive effect is not known. But Amen says alcohol is not good for the brain, and he had the "good fortune" of having an alcohol-soaked experience as a teenager that permanently turned him off drinking with any regularity.
Beyond the physical, brain health requires exercising your reasoning.
For instance, if you find yourself having inappropriate fantasies — say, putting the moves on your sister-in-law — Amen suggests using your brain to defuse the urge.
All you have to do is rationally continue the fantasy, allowing yourself to fully envision the havoc, heartache, yelling and shame that would result if you acted on your impulse. If your brain works properly, your urge will wither from the imagined fallout.
Some rational self-talk can also speed recovery from a breakup, if you take time to remind yourself that "relationships end because they don't work," as Amen puts it. Ridding yourself of associations that can fuel an obsessive heartbreak can help, as well.
"Look at the pictures, cry and then get rid of them," he says. "And get a different set of music."
Amen also says a little reasoning and neuro-knowledge is needed to override the differences in the way men's and women's brains operate.
"Male-female communication styles are radically different, brain-based and hard-wired," Amen writes.
Men, Amen says, would be well-served by remembering to listen without feeling compelled to jump in with solutions.
He says women would be best served by being direct in expressing their desires, without getting too wordy or expecting men to read any subtle cues about how they're feeling.
"Women want guys to read them like their girlfriends, and it just causes great pain," he says. "Repetition and good coaching is how men learn. So help `em out."
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TAKE THE BRAIN QUIZ
Here's a little neuro-romantic quiz based on Dr. Daniel Amen's book "Sex on the Brain: 12 Lessons to Enhance Your Love Life." (Some questions have more than one right answer.)
1. How much you enjoy sex is associated with which of the following?
a) The number of days of vacation you get each year
b) The number of dogs you have
c) Longevity for men
d) Longevity for women
2. New love works like which of these substances in the brain.
a) Novocaine
b) Pseudoephedrine
c) Cocaine
d) Rum
3. How does the size of the part of the brain responsive to sex hormones in men compare to its size in women?
a) 2.5 times as large
b) Half the size
c) Three times as large
d) 6.5 times as large
4. An economic study found that increasing sex from once a month to once a week provides a bump up in happiness equivalent to that induced by earning more money. How much more, for the average American?
a) $50,000 a year
b) $75,000 a year
c) $25,000 a year
d) $10,000 a year
5. Frequent sex is associated with which of the following:
a) Increased hair growth
b) Increased forgetfulness
c) Longevity for men
d) Longevity for women
e) Drooping ear lobes
6. Sex may help you to do which of the following:
a) Take fewer sick days at work
b) Unblock a stuffy nose
c) Get rid of a headache
d) Reduce depression
7. Orgasms are processed in the part of the brain where the following is also processed.
a) Winning an athletic competition
b) Religious experiences
c) Reading
d) Mathematical puzzle solving
8. Women leave relationships what percentage of the time?
a) 25 percent
b) 50 percent
c) 75 percent
d) 60 percent
9. Women generally find it sexy if men do which of the following?
a) Bring home a new board game
b) Give them a foot rub
c) Clean out the garage
d) Go jogging
ANSWERS
1. d) Frequency of sex has not been found to be a significant predictor of longevity for women, but reporting enjoyment of sex is associated with greater longevity for women.
2. c) When you see a newly beloved person, dopamine, a neurotransmitter, lights up areas deep in the brain, creating feelings of pleasure. Cocaine does much the same thing.
3. a) Amen writes that this indicates that "men are programmed to be more responsive to sexual feelings than women."
4. a) The same study found that there is no correlation between sexual frequency and income levels.
5. c) A 2001 study found that men who had sex three or more times a week reduced their risk of heart attack or stroke by half.
6 a), b), c) and d) are all true. Face it, sex is good for you.
7 b) Orgasms and religious experiences both appear to be processed in the right side of the brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex and the right temporal lobe. This may explain why both are enhanced by candles, dancing, music and rituals.
8 c) Women initiate breakups most of the time. Amen writes that men might think of that to remind them to "ask what she needs to be happy and listen."
9 b) The sensory area of the brain that corresponds to feet sensations is next door to the area of the brain where genital sensations are processed. In other words, there's a reason a foot rub can be seriously flirtatious. | Only registered users can write comments.
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