Sex In The Public Square - Mirror neurons, pornography and voyeurism - Comments

Mirror distortion?

Elizabeth — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 14:20:35 -0700

Or might it actually trigger homophobic reactions precisely because there is a subconscious level of identification that some straight guys would find so threatening to their sense of sexual identity that a distortion -- a revulsion instead of a mirroring -- would be produced?

Mirror neurons and porn

Elizabeth — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 08:06:47 -0700

It's fascinating, really. Zelda notes that our brains think we're playing each role that we watch, and I remember a therapist once telling me the same thing about interpreting dreams: that the each character in a dream represents some component of the dreamer. So clearly our brains think of us in more complex ways than our consciousness allows us to acknowledge.

Still, in terms of watching porn in light of the mirror neuron findings, it seems like our brains must do a lot of extrapolating between the firing of the neurons and the interpretation of our sexual/emotional reaction to what we see. I'm thinking especially of that genre of visual porn that is shot from a "first person" perspective. A blow job filmed for a straight man's pleasure would show a woman sucking a man's cock, but the man would be largely invisible. Maybe his cock would be shown as the woman's mouth slid up and down on it, but most of the focus would be on her face, her mouth. The friend who loves this kind of porn explains to me that he loves it because he can really "feel" the sensations much more so than he can when watching "third person" porn. Yet he certainly wouldn't interpret his reaction as having anything to do with feeling the sensation of his own mouth moving on someone else's cock. He's only interpreting the feeling of someone else's mouth on his cock.

So what is the connection here between the firing of the mirror neurons and the "sensation" or the experience of viewing as it is interpreted by the viewer's conscious mind?

Does this mean that if I put

Patrick Till — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 22:33:51 -0700

Does this mean that if I put straight guys in front of gay porn for awhile, they will mirror gay?

Mirror neurons, pornography and voyeurism

Zelda — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 21:01:40 -0700

Thinking about how mirror neurons work makes thinking about pornography and voyeurism all the more interesting, if not confusing. For any of you not familiar with our mirror neurons and how they function, have a look at a very good short little intro video from Nova Science Now
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3204/01.html

Basically, when we watch someone else do something, our brain responds almost as if we are doing what we're watching -- we watch a dancer and our motor neurons fire, we watch someone smile or frown and our brain responds as if we're happy and smiling or frowning and fuming. Watching others is the way we learn how to function and behave in our culture, and, because we feel what others feel when we watch them, mirror neurons are also central to having empathy for others.