What would we do without psychologists?
“This is just the first study which was focused on the idea that men of a certain age view sex as a highly desirable goal, and if you present them with a provocative woman, then that will tend to prime goal-related responses,” she told CNN.
Just the first? Obviously, this needs much more research. I hope that adequate billions from Porculus will fund this vital area of study. After all, we never before had any idea whatsoever that men might be attracted to semi-naked women.
[Update a few minutes later]
Mark Steyn has further thoughts.
Just for the sake of a challenge, I’m going to try to defend this one:
Functional MRI and other ways to study the brain’s ability to think (as opposed to its ability to metabolize) are the best way to establish a link between cognitive science and neurology. The above study seems rather silly, unless it is seen as an example of establishing that link. In other words, we really want to know “how does a lump of flesh create a thinking personality”, and studies like this one which examine what parts of the brain are active given different kinds of stimuli are a step toward answering that question. In particular, it is interesting that the part of a man’s brain that helps him use a hammer is activated when he is sexually attracted. After all, sex is a very ancient phenomenon, and even in humans, sex could have been hard-wired into a different part of the brain.
If all the pictures looked like that girl in the article it would have been lost on me. I’m not into these young women who are built like 15 year old, slender hipped boys. I think that “look” or “ideal” of beauty has been pushed on Anglo society by the homosexual men who design clothes.
They tend to LIKE teen aged boys.
Women like Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield would starve to death in Hollywood today. They’d be too “fat”. Am I showing my age?
Calling Peter Paul Rubens, calling Mr Rubens!!
I hate to say this, but Mark Steyn’s primed goal-related response did not yield what I would consider a good pick up line.
I’m just going to add: arousal has always struck me as weird, from a cognitive point of view. Some body functions are completely unconscious, like the brain activity that makes your heart beat. Some body functions are under conscious control, like making your hand move. Some body functions that require consciousness can be transformed into unconscious activity, such driving, typing, and most sports activity — you can type in English only when you’re conscious, but once you become a fast typist, you don’t have think about where your fingers go. With that sort of activity, even though we’re not handling the sub-routines, we’re still running the show – we can can take conscious control at any level of detail whenever we want – I can stop my fingers from typing at any moment, for example. So, that just about sums up how our bodies work; subconscious, conscious, and semi-conscious-with-a-conscious-interrupt. Except, that leaves out arousal. There are different kinds of arousal — fear, anger, sex, (more?), but in each case, the connection between our thoughts and how our bodies react is oddly tenuous. It is as if there is a subroutine activated, but it can’t be easily interupted and we can’t take over and command conscious control the way we can when we type. We can’t will ourselves to immediately not be angry, afraid, or aroused. When they are young, men learn tricks to will themselves to not have or keep an erection, but it is as if you pleading with someone else! Who?!
So, the study described above was looking at the conscious aspect of sex (where do you want to put your hands?) but it was edging toward the more peculiar non-conscious aspects of arousal, and that makes it interesting.
Terminology: I should have called heartbeats “non-conscious”, deliberate hand movement “conscious”, typing “semi-conscious”, and I suppose arousal can be “subconscious”, although the mechanics of arousal seem different than the kind of “subconsious” that Dr. Freud wrote about — having an erection is pretty different from making a Freudian slip….
IMHO, I don’t think it’s wise to make too many conclusions about a study based on its popular-press summary.
I’m also going to have to take issue with this quote from Mark Steyn: “Oh. ‘Images’. So men see photographs of women in bikinis as objects. As Kathy Shaidle says, maybe that’s because photographs are objects.”
The thing is, although I can’t seem to find the specific details on this study, I’m pretty sure the experimenters have at least some sort of clue about how to run a controlled experiment. In fact, it even says in the popular-press summary (I can’t seem to find any sign of the actual study) that they used photos of fully-clothed women as a control.
That said, I’m pretty sure the only reason this is getting any popular-press attention at all is because they used bikinis as a stimulus.
I’m with Steve. The photo accompanying the CNN story did nothing for me. Ribs sticking out, flat chest, and hair pulled back; she has no curves. Compare the CNN pic to this (LIFE mag photo, worksafe).
Oh man, that Israeli chick on the cover of SI. Wowzer! I think I’d broke the MRI machine.
The study seems stupid because the study is not the point. The point is coming up with a grant proposal that gets funding for another year or two. As long as that’s what’s important to the ‘researcher’ you will get stupid studies from time to time.
Glad to see that someone reminds this scientist that pictures are objects. I’m sure the nobel prize committee is lining up for this one.
Off topic, but speaking of prizes… I wonder what effect a trillion dollars of x-prizes would do to stimulate the economy… What would it cost since only a percentage of the prizes would be won? Just a thought.
Now we just need a study to find out why women wear bikinis.
“the brain areas associated with handling tools and the intention to perform actions light up”
By what basis do they think they know which tool the man is about to handle?