Orgasms could be better for our brains than doing a crossword or a Sudoku puzzle, an academic has claimed.
The sexual climax gives the whole brain a good workout, rather than just one area of it, Professor Barry Komisaruk said.
The sensation can, moreover, block pain and could therefore be used to alleviate the agony of childbirth, among other things, he suggested.
Depression, anxiety and addiction could also benefit if scientists can harness the pleasure-producing mechanism in the brain that produces orgasm and put it to other uses, he believes.
The 72-year-old US researcher has been studying female sexual pleasure since the 1960s, beginning his experiments on rats before moving on to women in 1982.
His decades of devotion to a subject that has scandalised some of his fellow academics at Rutgers University in New Jersey has made him something of an evangelist about the power and benefits of the sexual climax.
"At orgasm we see a tremendous increase in the blood flow (to the brain)," he told The Times.
"So my belief is it can’t be bad. It brings all the nutrients and oxygenation to the brain.
"Mental exercises (such as crosswords and Sudoku) increase brain activity but only in relatively localised regions. Orgasm activates the whole."
Prof Komisaruk has reached his conclusions after studying female volunteers in his brain scanning laboratory at the university’s Department of Psychology, measuring the blood flow in their brains as they climax.
For this, the women must lie in a narrow tube called a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine and achieve orgasm despite the clinical surroundings.
It is a pioneering science and there is still much to be learned from it, Prof Komisaruk believes.
"We know virtually nothing about pleasure," he said. "It’s important to understand how the brain produces it. What parts of the brain produce such intense pleasure, and can we use that in some way?"
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