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

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”).

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.

If you had to guess which group, men or women, has higher SE on average—a more sensitive accelerator—which would you pick? Men, right? Yep. At the population level, on average, men have more sensitive accelerators.10 And which group has higher SI—more sensitive brakes? Uh-huh. Women, on average, as a population, tend to have more sensitive brakes.

When the map doesn’t fit the terrain, the map is wrong, not the terrain.

Where the foot brake is associated with “fear of performance consequences,” the hand brake is associated with “fear of performance failure,” like worry about not having an orgasm.

Sexual Inhibition System (SI). Your sexual brakes. “Inhibition” here doesn’t mean “shyness” but rather neurological “off” signals. Research has found that there are actually two brakes, reflecting the different functions of an inhibitory system. One brake works in much the same way as the accelerator. It notices all the potential threats in the env

So now you go into the next chamber, where the lights are off, it’s quiet and calm, and it smells like home. You love it here, it’s like a spa for rats. In this context, when the researcher zaps your top NAc, the same thing happens—approach behaviors. But this is where it gets interesting: When the researcher zaps your bottom NAc… approach behavior

It’s true for all our sensory domains. A smell that seems pleasant when it’s labeled “cheese” smells gross when it is labeled “body odor.”7 Same smell + different context = different perception. Mood changes your perception of taste, too: feeling sad, as you do at the end of a weepy movie, reduces your ability to taste fat in food.8 It’s true in al

It goes like this: On the day you’re born, you’re given a little plot of rich and fertile soil, slightly different from everyone else’s. And right away, your family and your culture start to plant things and tend the garden for you, until you’re old enough to take over its care yourself. They plant language and attitudes and knowledge about love an