Sexual Behavior
Topics from the archives of the Mad Science Museum related to the study of sexual behavior. Arranged in descending chronological order.
Electrified Sheep
& Elephants on Acid
 |  |
Categories
|
If you were a man walking across the campus of Florida State University in 1978, an attractive young woman might have approached you and said these exact words: "I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be attractive. Would you go to bed with me tonight?" If you were that man, you probably would have thought that you had just gotten incredibly lucky. But not really. You were actually an unwitting subject in an experiment designed by the psychologist Russell Clark. |
 In 1954 James Olds and Peter Milner of McGill University discovered that the septal region is the feel-good center of the brain. Electrical stimulation of it produces sensations of intense pleasure and sexual arousal. They demonstrated their discovery by inserting wires into a rat's brain and then showing that when the rat figured out it could self-stimulate itself by pressing a lever, it would maniacally bang on that lever up to two-thousand times an hour. (The image at the very top of this page, third from the right, shows one of Olds and Milner's rats banging on its lever.)In 1970, Robert Heath of Tulane University dreamed up a far more novel application of Olds and Milner's discovery. Heath decided to test whether repeated stimulation of the septal region could transform a homosexual man into a heterosexual. |
|
Stimuli Eliciting Sexual Behavior in Turkeys (circa 1965)
 Male turkeys, presented with a lifelike model of a female turkey, will happily try to mate with it as eagerly as they would with the real thing. This observation intrigued Martin Schein and Edgar Hale of the University of Pennsylvania, and made them curious about what the minimal stimulus was that would excite a turkey. They embarked on a series of experiments to find out. This involved removing parts from a turkey model one by one, to determine when the male turkey would eventually lose interest. |
 Johann Wilhelm Ritter |