Today is the solstice with asteroid Atlantis, Pluto and the Sun piled up. How could I have missed the symbolism? Scientists yesterday announced the development of a sex chip: a brain implant that can send little jolts to the orbitofrontal cortex, which processes pleasure from food and sex.
Who says the two are not related? Who says we don’t stuff ourselves sick at Burger King because we’re horny? Okay let’s save that for a different article. This is about technology. Pluto + Atlantis = sex technology. But of course. Aries Point (i.e., on the solstice) says big implications. Capricorn says, are we really concerned about feelings, or rather about the structure of it all? It is only the external nature of Capricorn that is about mechanical functioning; the interior layers are every bit as sensitive as, say, Pisces.
The Times of London reported today,
A research survey conducted by Morten Kringelbach, senior fellow at Oxford University’s department of psychiatry, and reported in the Nature Reviews Neuroscience journal, found that the orbitofrontal cortex could be a “new stimulation target” to help people suffering from anhedonia, an inability to experience pleasure from such activities. Stimulating this area can produce pleasure as intense as “devouring a delicious pastry,” he said.
His colleague Tipu Aziz, a professor of neurosurgery at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, predicted a significant breakthrough in the science behind a “sex chip” within 10 years.
Here is the part I thought was funny. They actually tried to install one, once:
“There is evidence that this chip will work,” Aziz said last week. “A few years ago a scientist implanted such a device into the brain of a woman with a low sex drive and turned her into a very sexually active woman. She didn’t like the sudden change, so the wiring in her head was removed.”
Ah yes, finally a solution to the allegedly low female sex drive. I think this may be the development that gets our civilization to the bottom of the ocean quicker than, say, the iPhone.
Note, there is an article about Atlantis coming in Next World Stories.
Hmm… I think I encountered the equivalent of the ‘sex chip’ when I made a special infusion of several roots in 2006/2007 for my cohort. Our experiments made clear that the mechanical intensification of sensation has nearly nothing to do with actual pleasure, and even less to do with the proper tantric distribution of bodhicitta, the ‘virtue’ of sexual energy that triggers Awakening.
I had gotten the gist of this idea during my pregnancies, but being able to actually control those variables brought the point home in a more deliberate way.
But . . . I don’t suppose we’ll be hearing from the NIH until we’re too busy to return their calls, eh?
Back to my brooding and spinning…
M
Sun-Pluto-Atlantis: Pretty cool astrology to be marking PW’s 10 years as well. Happy Anniversary to all.