Metaphysics& Making Love

Science of the Orgasm (Los Angeles Times)

As they seek to document and demystify one of life’s great thrills, scientists have run across some real head-scratchers.

How, for example, can they explain the fact that some men and women who are paralyzed and numb below the waist are able to have orgasms?

How to explain the “orgasmic auras” that can descend at the onset of epileptic seizures — sensations so pleasurable they prompt some patients to refuse antiseizure medication?

And how on Earth to explain the case of the amputee who felt his orgasms centered in that missing foot?

No one — no sexologist, no neuroscientist — really knows. For a subject with so many armchair experts, the human orgasm is remarkably mysterious.

But today, a few scientists are making real progress — in part because they’re changing their focus. To uncover the orgasm’s secrets, researchers are looking beyond the clitoris, vagina, penis and prostate, to the place behind the scenes where the true magic happens. They’re examining the central nervous system: the network of electrical impulses that zip to and fro through the brain and spinal cord.

In an orgasm orchestra, the genitalia may be the instruments, but the central nervous system is the conductor.

Armed with new lab tools and fearless volunteers, scientists are getting first-ever glimpses of how the brain lights up (and, in places, shuts down) when the orgasmic fireworks go off. They’re tracing nerves and finding new pathways for pleasure that help explain how people with shattered spinal cords can defy sexual expectations.

A few labs are even tinkering with devices that could put patients directly in touch with their orgasmic abilities by letting them observe their sexual brain patterns and “train” themselves to find the elusive frisson, or (in something akin to the Orgasmatron in Woody Allen’s 1973 movie “Sleeper”) letting them zap a sweet spot in their spinal cord with toe-curling electrical pulses.

“There’s a tremendous amount we don’t know about orgasms,” says Barry R. Komisaruk, psychology professor at Rutgers University and coauthor of the 2006 book “The Science of Orgasm.” “But we’re on the verge of getting a lot of very important information and really understanding what to do with it.”

Although my first reaction to reading this article was that the science was ruining one of the world’s remaining wonders, I have begun to see the study in a new light.

According to Daniel Pinchbeck, author of “2012: Return of Quetzalcoatl”, the world will soon be entering into a new age in which universal understanding with be as natural as breathing. One of spiritual enlightenment and psychic connection. This new age will proceed from one of several ages characterized by accelerated technology.

Perhaps this is a feeble correlation at best, but I feel as though this study is a symbol of sorts: today’s society attempting to develop a better understanding of its sexual spirituality - something that will become very natural and inherent very soon.

I realize that these theories sounds outlandish, but there a incredible amount of scientific, as well as mythic, backing to the concept. I highly suggest reading Pinchbeck’s book, skeptic or otherwise. For information regarding the world’s ages (its interesting, even if you don’t buy it), be sure to check out the following website:

http://www.rambles.net/pinchbeck_q07.html

Reblogged from psychology notes..

@ 3:11 pm

Public Announcement from a Pizza Girl

I would like to make a public announcement: To those of you who are unaware, the 17 year old girl working thanklessly behind the counter at the Silvercity Ancaster’s Pizza Pizza Express for minimum wage, has no say whatsoever in the pricing of your pepperoni pizza.

Do NOT take your frustration out on me for it is, in no way, my fault. In fact, you are the ones at fault, for exclaiming “My God! That is outrageous! How do you guys make any money!?” and then proceeding to hand over your debit card.

How do make our money? Idiots like you.

@ 9:41 am

The Posteverything Revolution

jessicachu:

The Posteverything Generation

Nicholas Handler
Yale University, Class of 2009

I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. That’s pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my iPod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the seemingly blase college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one.

According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that it’s impossible. The difficulty is that it is so …. post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it– naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution of modernism–that it’s sometimes hard to see what it actually is. It denies that anything can be explained neatly or even at all. It is parodic, detached, strange, and sometimes menacing to traditionalists who do not understand it. Although it arose in the post-war west (the term was coined in 1949), the generation that has witnessed its ascendance has yet to come up with an explanation of what postmodern attitudes mean for the future of culture or society. The subject intrigued me because, in a class otherwise consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempting to the young and curious. But it also intrigued me because the question of what postmodernism–what a movement so post-everything, so reticent to define itself–is spoke to a larger question about the political and popular culture of today, of the other jaded sophomores sitting around me who had grown up in a postmodern world.

In many ways, as a college-aged generation, we are also extremely post: post-Cold War, post-industrial, post-baby boom, post-9/11…at one point in his famous essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” literary critic Frederic Jameson even calls us “post-literate.” We are a generation that is riding on the tail-end of a century of war and revolution that toppled civilizations, overturned repressive social orders, and left us with more privilege and opportunity than any other society in history. Ours could be an era to accomplish anything.

And yet do we take to the streets and the airwaves and say ‘here we are, and this is what we demand’? Do we plant our flag of youthful rebellion on the mall in Washington and say ‘we are not leaving until we see change! Our eyes have been opened by our education and our conception of what is possible has been expanded by our privilege and we demand a better world because it is our right’? It would seem we do the opposite. We go to war without so much as questioning the rationale, we sign away our civil liberties, we say nothing when the Supreme Court uses Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw desegregation, and we sit back to watch the carnage on the evening news.

On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobe’s worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning–a generation defined negatively against what came before us. When Al Gore once said “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” he might as well have been echoing his entire generation’s critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for bland imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che Geuvera tee-shirt.

Jameson calls it “Pastiche”–”the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.” In literature, this means an author speaking in a style that is not his own– borrowing a voice and continuing to use it until the words lose all meaning and the chaos that is real life sets in. It is an imitation of an imitation, something that has been re-envisioned so many times the original model is no longer relevant or recognizable. It is mass-produced individualism, anticipated revolution. It is why postmodernism lacks cohesion, why it seems to lack purpose or direction. For us, the post-everything generation, pastiche is the use and reuse of the old cliches of social change and moral outrage–a perfunctory rebelliousness that has culminated in the age of rapidly multiplying non-profits and relief funds. We live our lives in masks and speak our minds in a dead language–the language of a society that expects us to agitate because that’s what young people do.

But how do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution? How do we rebel against parents that sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We don’t. We rebel by not rebelling. We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the internet, with websites like moveon.org. It is in the rapidly developing ability to communicate ideas and frustration in chatrooms instead of on the streets, and channel them into nationwide projects striving earnestly for moderate and peaceful change: we are the generation of Students Taking Action Now Darfur; we are the Rock the Vote generation; the generation of letter-writing campaigns and public interest lobbies; the alternative energy generation.

College as America once knew it–as an incubator of radical social change– is coming to an end. To our generation the word ‘radicalism’ evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. ‘Campus takeover’ sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities of today. However, the technological revolution, the moveon.org revolution, the revolution of the organization kid, is just as real and just as profound as the revolution of the 1960’s– it is just not as visible. It is a work in progress, but it is there. Perhaps when our parents finally stop pointing out the things that we are not, the stories that we do not write, they will see the threads of our narrative begin to come together; they will see that behind our pastiche, the post generation speaks in a language that does make sense. We are writing a revolution. We are just putting it in our own words.

First of all, what a wonderful piece of writing. Secondly, this post has given me renewed faith my “my generation” and, perhaps to more value, my own ability to make change. I am, as Handler puts it, “nostalgic for revolution”. I have always admired the love-ins and protests of the 60s and dreamed of them reoccuring today; however, from the few modern “protests” that I have attended I have gotten a sense of ineffectiveness. They just don’t have the same impact as they once did.

I have never felt very romanced by the “letter writing campaigns and public interest lobbies” of my generation until now. While these things may lack some of the colourful vigor of our parent’s anti-Nam demonstrations and they make up for it in the change that they DO create. We have to remember, it was three young kids from the US - Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey, and Laren Poole - who founded Invisible Children and brought Joseph Kony himself from hiding to engage in peace talks with the Ugandan government. This is the kind of change we make. This is the kind of power we have.

Reblogged from Of Vice and Men.

May 7th, 2009 @ 11:01 pm

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

E. B. White

I have always known this to be one of my greatest conflicts in life. It is interesting to read such familiar thoughts written by someone else. I admire his simplicity for this dilemma has always been a complicated and messy one for me.

@ 10:20 pm

My Anti-Twitter

I have this theory: If something is worth writing about, it probably deserves more than 20 or so words, as well a better venue than Twitter. I am a poet, a journalist, an all around writer with a respect for the written word. I have dabbled in blogging before, to little avail; however, in insurgent response to the ever-increasing popularity of Twitter, I have decided to give it another go. For the dignity of literacy, if that doesn’t sound too pretentious.

I am not yet fully decided on the content of my blog. Likely, it will be an outlet for me to explore ideas, express opinions, and share interesting things that I learn along the way. I will likely include the occasional poem as well! (Give the debatable nature that I expect my blog will possess, any and all comments, rebuttals, agreements, advice, etc. would be greatly appreciated). One of the things that I dislike about Twitter is its “hyper-connectivity” it by which people feel obliged to share every minute detail of their life with the rest of their world. While some may appreciate this sort of “insight”, most seem to find it excessive and unnecessary. I have to agree. However, I will be moving to Toronto this coming September to study Journalism at Ryerson. It is for this reason, that I do plan on posting about my exciting university adventures and all the city happenings that I embark on for the benefit of curious friends, family, and bored acquaintances.

Anyhow, I look forward to hearing from some fellow Tumblrs so leave me a friendly message if you happen to stop by! And expect my first real post to appear shortly!

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