SCIENCE has looked into some strange things over the centuries — reports of gargantuan sea monsters, purported images of Jesus, sightings of alien spaceships and so on. When I first heard of spontaneous orgasm, while researching a book on yoga, including its libidinal cousin, tantra, I figured it was more allegory than reality and in any event would prove beyond the reach of even the boldest investigators.
Well, I was wrong. It turns out science has tiptoed around the subject for more than a century and of late has made considerable progress in determining not only the neurophysiological basis of the phenomenon but also its prevalence. Men are mentioned occasionally. But sex researchers have found that the novel type of autoerotism shows up mainly in women.
Ground zero for the research is Rutgers University, where scientists have repeatedly had female volunteers put their heads into giant machines and focus their attention on erotic fantasies — the scans reveal that the pleasure centers of their brains light up in ways indistinguishable from everyday orgasms. The lab atmosphere is no-nonsense, with plenty of lights and white coats and computer monitors.
Subjects often thrash about so forcefully that obtaining clear images of their brains can be difficult.
"Head movement is a huge issue," Nan Wise, a doctoral candidate at Rutgers who helps run the project, said in an interview. "It's hard to get a decent signal."
She said a volunteer's moving her head more than two millimeters — less than a 10th of an inch — can make for a bad day in the lab.
It is easy to dismiss this as a new kind of narcissism in search of scientific respectability, a kinky pleasure coming out of the shadows. Many YouTube videos now purport to show people using controlled breathing and erotic introspection to achieve what they describe as "thinking off" and "energy orgasms."
But the research is also illuminating a plausible neurological basis for the long intermingling of sexuality and mysticism and, in particular, the teachings of tantra, which arose in medieval India as a path to spiritual ecstasy. Perhaps most important, it illustrates how little we really know of human physiology. Scientists have long debated the purpose of the female orgasm, which plays no direct role in procreation. The emerging reality of spontaneous orgasm seems to do nothing but deepen the mystery.
The investigations began more than a century ago as physicians described what some called psychic coitus.
On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, at the Metropolitan Dispensary and Hospital for Women and Children, the chief physician, T. J. McGillicuddy, issued a warning in "Functional Disorders of the Nervous System in Women," published in 1896. He said "involuntary orgasms" from erotic thoughts could lower a woman's vital energies and "cause melancholia and mental weakness."
As a cure, he recommended hard mattresses and cold sponge baths.
The stigma associated with spontaneous orgasm fell away as sex investigators began to see autoerotism as a normal part of human experience.
Havelock Ellis, the pioneering British physician, described the contemplative state in his landmark six-volume study of sexual behavior, published between 1897 and 1910. He said that concentrating on sexual images, among other stimuli, could lead to "spontaneous orgasm in either sex, even in perfectly normal persons."
Surveys revealed that the phenomenon, while rare, nonetheless seemed to occur with some regularity. In 1948, Alfred C. Kinsey of Indiana University and his colleagues published "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male." That groundbreaking study looked at thousands of cases but noted only two in which men "could reach climax by deliberate concentration of thought on erotic situations."
But the team's follow-up report on women, published in 1953, surveyed 2,727 women, and the researchers found that 2 percent of the interviewees — 54 women — reported an ability to reach orgasm by "fantasy alone."
William J. Broad is a science reporter for The New York Times and the author of "The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards."
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