Why Good Sex Matters: Understanding the Neuroscience of Pleasure for a Smarter, Happier, and More Purpose-Filled Life

Since sex embodies pleasure, it affords us a particularly powerful lens through which to understand pleasure more broadly. It captures the complicated interplay between emotion, neural pathways, and personal experience—indeed all the factors that go into being able to have—and appreciate—true pleasure.

In these studies, I also wanted to understand more about female sexual response, which was so understudied, and how exactly the brain is involved. I looked at how some of my ladies of the lab responded under two different conditions: orgasm brought about when a woman stimulated her own genitals, and that induced by a partner’s stimulation of her ge

And yet, what I observe daily in my clinical practice is that for all of this pleasure-seeking behavior, all this wanting of pleasure, very few of us seem able to fully experience the sensations or satisfaction we seek.

A client may not realize that they are experiencing an emotional imbalance, but they do know if they can’t orgasm. Our sex lives are often the bellwethers of our emotional issues.

One of the original goals of my research was to fill a huge gap in the scientific literature—to figure out the basic sensory wiring of the female genitals. It’s still hard for me to believe that this basic and important work was not done until 2011, when we published a study that systematically mapped the projections of the clitoris, anterior wall

Capturing this evidence of blood flow to the brain also showed that an orgasm not only feels good but is good for us. We are meant to experience pleasure.

the brain was also having a very powerful experience. In fact, my research was showing that as genital stimulation led up to orgasm, numerous brain regions involved in processing sensations, emotions, rewards, and pleasure were becoming highly activated, with more and more brain areas lighting up, until at the apex of orgasm the brain looked like a

Our relationship with our sexuality gives us a way to assess our capacity for pleasure, and, as we do so, evaluate the functioning of the emotional brain.

Driven by the neurotransmitter dopamine, our SEEKING system is meant to cue us to feel enthusiastic about going into the world to pursue what we need and want through experiences. When this system becomes overstimulated and hijacked by chronic stress and attention overload, a domino effect occurs, disrupting all the systems at once, making us hyper