Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life

On the contrary. In a study of cocaine addicts, research participants’ mesolimbic systems responded to images related to cocaine that flashed on a screen for thirty-three milliseconds. If you asked them what they saw, they wouldn’t be able to tell you, because the images flashed too fast to be “seen” consciously, but it was long enough to light up

like in chapter 6 we’ll learn that genital response is learning while the conscious experience of being “turned on” is learning + liking.

Desire is pleasure in context.

The sequence works this way: Something sex-related happens, and your brain goes, “Hey, that’s sex-related.” That’s learning. And if the context is right, your brain also goes, “Hey, that’s nice!” That’s liking. And if the stimulus is nice enough, your brain goes, “Ooh, go get more of that!” That’s wanting.

Your central nervous system (your brain and spinal cord) is made up of a series of partnerships of accelerator and brakes—like the pairing of your sympathetic nervous system (“accelerator”) and your parasympathetic nervous system (“brakes”).

low stress high affection explicitly erotic

These changes in perception are not “just in your head.” People who are given a drug that will relax them and are told, “This is a drug that will relax you,” not only feel more relaxed compared to those who got the drug but not the information, they also have more of the drug in their blood plasma.11 Context changes more than how you feel; it can c

Wanting—more technically known as “incentive salience”—is the generic accelerator of the emotional brain. It fuels the desire to move toward something or away from it. When wanting is activated with the stress response mechanism, we search for safety. When wanting is activated with the attachment mechanism (see the next chapter), we seek affection.

What if you have the opposite combination—sensitive brakes plus not-so-sensitive accelerator? This describes about 1 to 4 percent of