research grant proposal #742; bike part du jour

[sistawendy]

When you give people radioactive glucose to drink, stick their heads in the appropriate scanner, and show them appropriate porn, does the woo-woo center in their brains light up? Has anybody even done that experiment? If that works, we've invented real gaydar.

Bike part du jour: rear derailleur cable. At least it had the decency to break when I was most of the way to work. There's a bike shop about a mile away.

Comments

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

Being too lazy to dig up citations, this is off the top of my head, but s/glucose/various neurotransmitters/, yes.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

Iiinteresting! So what were the results?

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

It works?

I dunno, try http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=17493836&ordinalpos=10&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum or http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=16813919&ordinalpos=35&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum or http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=16255007&ordinalpos=53&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum or ask me again when I have more time on my hands.

[savannarama.livejournal.com]

A University of Chicago study (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/031118074946.htm) involved brain scans (this is page 4 of an article about a set of twins and the subject of the brain and orientation, etc.

A different (Swedish) study (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2005/08/14/what_makes_people_gay/?page=4) involving brain scans.

The hypothalamus comes up a lot...

[xaotica.livejournal.com]

yes, it's been done. one of the interesting findings was that women who identified as "straight" were physically aroused by almost anything they were shown involving sex, whether it be straight, lesbian, animal, anything. whereas men who identified as "straight" were more likely to only be aroused by straight pr0n and those who identified as "gay" more likely to be only aroused by gay pr0n.

there's a number of theories about this, one being that women are more empathetic so they can more easily imagine themself in a given situation even if they aren't aroused by the participants themselves, another being that we're just way more horny than we're taught and suppress it due to societal teachings