Daily Meh is an edited stream of consciousness, by Simen.

The Orgasmic Mind: The Neurological Roots of Sexual Pleasure

Scientific American article on the science of orgasms. In it, we learn such interesting facts as:

• Men are mainly aroused by their preferred type of partner (e.g., females for heterosexual men) while heterosexual women are less discriminating: they were generally aroused regardless of actors — men, women or bonobo chimps (!)
• The intensity of response in one of the brain’s main pleasure centers during ejaculation is comparable to that induced by heroin.
• While men show heightened activity in the parts of the brain that deal with emotions during orgasm, women in general seem to turn off the parts of the brain that deal with emotions during orgasm. (“At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.”)

There’s one methodological caveat, though: how in the world do you ensure that the same emotional (etc.) response appears in a sterile laboratory environment, hooked up to a positron-emission scanner, as when in the intimacy of your home?