How everything started

Attempts · 09 May 2026

Year 1 of my PhD - first experiment on pain perception. 7 different experimenters, 2 weeks, 3 sessions per participants, overlapping methodics. Timing is too tight, tiredness brings out silly errors in us - I am severely underprepared and thinking about whether academia is for me (well, I still do).

Then the idea - why not doing this again, but for sexual pleasure?

That is where you realize you got into pain neuroscience because you are that type of masochist.

But for real: in the breaks I start researching a bit if there are laboratories that deal with sexual pleasure and neurophysiology. I specifically aim at experiments that stimulate genitals with a pleasurable sensation and record EEG: turns out there is not so much there, a lot of the research has been done in the 70s (and it is quite fun –> you can see a review here). So I widen my scope to any sex laboratory I can find online - and I contact all of them.

Not a lot of responses, but some (I will not tell the names for privacy) agree to have a chat, and redirect me to scientists that, albeit not having published yet, are working right now with recording EEG during pleasure stimulation. That is where everything starts.

All good - but what’s the idea here?

In order to understand the type of research I will be talking about in this blog and the idea behind drawing parallels between pain and pleasure, I need to take a step back.

My PhD project had so far been centered on the electrophysiological correlates of pain perception - meaning that we record EEG (mainly, my lab deals also with MEG and MRI) while healthy participants undergo very tightly programmed pain stimuli.

The stimuli we use are temperature increases or decreases - it turns out that you can elicit a burning/painful sensation without actually harming the person! (I didn’t know it before starting - it is so cool, isn’t it?). If you do it several times, and you average the EEG segments by aligning them to the stimulus onset, you end up averaging out the noise and making the time-locked activity more visible (there are called ERP, that stays for event related potentials). I basically measure standard features of these ERP (e.g. peaks, amplitudes), but also the “complexity” of the time series (it is quite an extensive topic - you can find a preprint here if you are curious).

The main idea is - can we do the same for sexual pleasure? We could use a sex toy, deliver dozens pleasurable stimuli at a certain intensity and see what happens in the brain. Easy, not?

Well, definitely not. I will talk more extensively about this, but the lab I am collaborating with now has tried doing it, and there are a lot of technical difficulties. Just some of them:

which anatomy do you select?
which type of sitmulus do you use? (I guess vibratory, but you could use air pressure)
where? (vaginal/clitoreal? If you have a penis is even more difficult)
what is a correct duration?
which device do you use? How do you program it?
if you use a bluetooth device, how do you retrieve the onset time for the stimulus accounting for a variable lag?
how do you account for changes in excitation?
how do you do a long enough experiment without making people having an orgasm?

Just food for thought now. We will discuss each point later :)