A Classic Orgasm Mystery

Journos

In this episode, two stories about trying to figure out what’s on someone’s mind.

In the first, we ogle the news media's obsession over the story of a woman who may or may not have had a "full-body orgasm" during a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 at the LA Philharmonic Orchestra. The only folks who hope the music moved her to sexual ecstasy more than the press? The LA Phil, no doubt.

The story hinges on the frustrating fact that we just can't get into that woman's head, and so — speculation is the mother of titillation. But the technology to read minds may now be here, according to a new study out of the University of Texas at Austin.

Participants got fed hours of podcast audio in an fMRI and had their reactions to the words and phrases recorded. When participants were asked later to think of a particular story, the researchers (with help from some artificial intelligence) were apparently able to figure out with crazy accuracy the content of the story.

Naturally, this took us straight into fears of LL Bean reading our minds to find out our deepest feelings on fleece, and we had to dig into the current state of research on "mental privacy."

Come with us (so to speak) and be reminded why the brain is the biggest sex organ ... and why it's a flimsy, see-through little number.

Listen to this so many times a machine can hear it in your thoughts.

NOTES

The "Orgasm Audio" is a sexual Zapruder film // The fMRI technically just reads your blood, not your thoughts // The original performance of Maurice Ravel's "Bolero" also made people a little nutty // The "Bolero" we sampled is from a 2010 Lucerne Festival performance by the Wiener Philharmoniker with conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who went on to (possibly) conduct a woman to orgasm over at the LA Phil.