Why is sexual activity about the brain?

[Teacher]

Libido ”is one of the main concepts introduced into the world lexicon by the founding father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. During its existence, this word has acquired many meanings and interpretations in the cultural field. In modern psychology, it is used as a synonym for sexual attraction, but at the very dawn of psychoanalysis, everything was much more complicated. We will tell you how the role of libido has changed and what they propose to do with it now.

Life energy for all occasions
In its original meaning, the term "libido" is described as a special vital energy underlying sexual desire and, in principle, any manifestation of love. Even to my parents. This energy existed in the human body and, if it was not allowed to pour out into sexual practices or sexual behavior, it became the cause of neuroses or creativity.
According to Freud, libido originated in the unconscious (id) and, traveling through the human body, contributed to his psychosexual development in five main stages:
Oral stage - when an infant (up to 1.5 years old) experiences the pleasure of breastfeeding.
The anal stage is when an infant (1.5 to 3 years old) enjoys controlling bowel movements and urination.
Phallic stage - at this age, children from 3 to 6 years old, according to Freud, begin an active study of their body, physiology, compare themselves with other children.
The latent stage is the same, from 6 to 12 years old, during which the sons develop the Oedipus complex, and the daughters develop the Electra complex, when, according to Freud, children direct sexual attention to parents of the opposite sex.
The genital stage - from the age of 12, when a person has already begun puberty.
If in the process of growing up a person there were some failures in the shift of emphasis of libido, then the result was behavioral pathologies.
Libido long enough remained the cornerstone of human behavior, as psychologists saw it. But science did not stand still, new methods were added to the observation of patients (the study of brain activity and physiological reactions), and it turned out that Freud was not so wrong in describing libido.

The key to happiness
Now "libido" is used synonymously with sex drive. It describes a person's desire and ability to have sex. If Freud considered libido a physiological need along with hunger, then today it is part of the human motivational system.
And, of course, this is not an ephemeral energy plying the body. Libido is a whole set of sex (and not only) hormones that are responsible for a person's sexual behavior, as well as brain responses that are responsible for reading sexually relevant signals.
The way libido works is most easily compared to picking up a Rubik's Cube. For the puzzle to be considered solved, all the colors on each face must match. Libido works in the same way, it is necessary that all factors converge:
Sexually relevant signals read.
The brain selects from the many signals it receives, those associated with sex. It could be a partner's touch, kissing, movement, or an appearance that you perceive as sexual.
Hormones released.
A whole cocktail of pituitary hormones, sex hormones and neurotransmitters enters the bloodstream, which make the body ready for action.
Circumstances are approved by the brain.
There is such a thing as non-concordance, which Emily Nagoski talks about in detail in the book "How a Woman Wants". This is a situation where a person's genital response signaling arousal does not match what they actually think. In men, according to research results, the coincidence of the genital response with arousal "in the brain" is 50%, and in women - only 10%.
For some, this process of assembling a puzzle is easier, for others it is more difficult. In many ways, it depends on sexual temperament - the characteristics that the surrounding culture imposes on a person's sexual behavior.

To save, to save, or not to touch?
Libido is a rather fragile structure. Anything can affect the speed of solving the puzzle and success: stress, submitting an annual report, negotiating the terms of a preferential mortgage, distrust and fear of parting with a partner or a broken leg. In response to stress, libido can fluctuate both upward and downward.
Due to stereotypes that society and popular culture lays about sexual behavior, many people may be unhappy with their type of attraction and believe that it needs to be changed. Sometimes these attempts can lead to even more problems than it was in the "before" stage. Here are a couple of tips on what to do if you're not sure if everything is as it should.

Contact a specialist
A psychologist and sexologist will help you figure out what the problems with attraction are connected with and whether they are. As we said, the problem can be psychological, trauma, or chronic stress. An expert will help you get through it. If the problem lies in the physiological plane, you will be referred to an endocrinologist for the preparation of drug therapy. Remember that hormonal drugs to correct libido must be prescribed by a doctor.

Learn to play the cards that you got when dealing
This is a challenging skill and requires breaking stereotypes about sexual behavior. You need to learn to live in your body, hear it and enjoy the way it is. To master this skill, a person can experiment, explore new sexual practices and - of course - be sincere in a relationship with a partner when it comes to sexual desire.

 

[Tomcat]

Remote Controlled Brain​

Just about 10 years ago, Stanford University psychiatrist and bioengineer Karl Deisseroth, along with his team of scientists, published his paper on Optical Brain Control, a new method of brain research now known as optogenetics.

How does this method work? A light-sensitive protein (photoactivated protein) is injected into the membrane of nerve cells, neurons that make up our nervous system. As you might guess from the name of this protein, it is activated by light, allowing you to find the right groups of neurons in the brain of a person or animal. What does it do? For a long time, neurologists and neurophysiologists judged the principles of brain functioning, having at their disposal its general structure, an approximate "map" of neurons (and there are almost 80 billion of them in the human brain!) And cases of disorders that they encountered when working with patients.

Indeed, sometimes a shaky gait or a sudden loss of the ability to maintain balance after a head injury is the best incentive to find out how it happened that, for example, a blow fell in the head, and completely different parts of the body were affected. Clinical cases can also be useful in the study of mental illness. But without a detailed study of the neurons themselves, which form complex branched networks, each of which can determine one or another function of our body, the study of complex nervous activity slows down significantly. If you can highlight and thoroughly discern specific groups of neurons, things go much faster. But this is not the only "bonus".

"Highlighting" neurons allows you to study in detail individual parts of the brain"

Controlling mouse minds ...​

Let's go back to Karl Deisserot and his super team of scientists. To create not just a system for "detecting" neurons, but also a system for their control, the scientists modified the nerve cells in the mouse brain with rhodopsin genes found in algae. Rhodopsins, in turn, use energy, allowing charged ions to enter cells. Well, charged ions can change the electrical activity of neurons, affecting the behavior of the animal.

But even such optogenetic methods were not enough for researchers. Optogenetic methods did not allow penetration into dense adipose tissue of the brain, creating serious obstacles on the way to the deep structures of the brain. Then they invented "implants", fiber-optic cables, which made it possible to "light a light bulb", in other words, to conduct light into hard-to-reach areas of the brain and neural networks. But this was a rather serious intervention in the brain, so that the scientists did not calm down on this, but came up with another tool that would not disrupt neural networks, and at the same time would help manipulate the behavior of mice - experimental in this entire long and painstaking experiment.

Mouse with built-in fiber optic to deliver light

If you show courageous resistance to cumbersome terms-sets of incomprehensible words, know: American bioengineers called their new method of controlling mouse minds DREADD (designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs), which in English sounds like the technology of synthetic receptors activated by a given ligand. It is much easier to realize the result and significance of the application of what was called so terrifying: now you can control the minds in the literal sense of the word: from activating the feeling of hunger to bringing to sleep or wakefulness.

Parkinson's not a hindrance to us!​

At the University of California, a team of scientists led by fellow bioengineer Anatol Kreutzer began working with Deisseroth to test how the developed method could help treat Parkinson's disease. And, lo and behold! They were able to first disrupt the movement of mice, mimicking their Parkinson's disease, and then restore normal locomotor activity. In addition, they experimentally proved that it is now possible to euthanize and awaken a mouse without any surgical or hypnotic intervention!
Of course, it's not that simple. Still, DREADD involves taking a drug, a substance that allows you to crank up such a scheme. So it can hardly be called brain remote control, which was so boldly declared in the title of this article.

The main drawback here is the slow course of taking the drug, which often simply cannot keep up with the rapid changes in brain activity. But over the past couple of years, researchers have developed another technology that already uses low-frequency radio waves or a magnetic field, which can also penetrate the brain without causing any harm to the test subjects. The waves are used to heat iron oxide nanoparticles, which are injected into the body and target a region of the brain of interest.
Here you can cautiously notice that scientists are very close precisely to remote control of thoughts ... Is this good? There is something to think about.

Brain mapping is a real work of art. And perhaps it is thanks to the breakthrough technologies of bioengineers.

Should psychiatrists look for new jobs?​

This whole series of experiments on the neurons of mice was carried out not only with the aim of having fun by putting the animals to sleep or awakening: the possibility of helping people recover from mental illnesses, which are still quite difficult to treat, is being considered quite seriously. But you need to start small: for example, while research is underway on how to eliminate depression using the methods described above. Who knows, maybe they will soon be able to cure many other mental illnesses. It seems now it's just a matter of time ...