Wow, that's a badly-written article.
Quote:
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.
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2 mm of movement is "thrashing about forcefully"? They make it sound like there's a whole When Harry Met Sally thing going on, when all it is is that, typically, awake human subjects find it difficult to hold completely and utterly still during fMRI scanning. We knew that already.
They also don't seem to have actually shown that their subjects were reaching orgasm, as far as I can tell amongst that muddle; just that their equipment and methods detected arousal (and couldn't distinguish it from the moment of orgasm).
Bottom line: some subjects feel arousal while having erotic fantasies. How groundbreaking!
ETA: I poked around and I think I've found the source. I can't figure out how to link to it, but just look for "Tactile imagery somatotopically activates genital sensory homunculus: fMRI evidence ".
Spoiler:
In the course of our previous study (Komisaruk et al, 2009; SFN Abstracts 562.18) in which we mapped the sensory cortical representation of the clitoris, vagina, cervix, nipple and finger, our control procedure - imagining stimulation of those specific body regions while remaining motionless - generated activity that overlapped substantially with that induced by their actual physical stimulation. That is, when the research participants were instructed to imagine the thumb being tapped, the corresponding homuncular region of the somatosensory cortex became activated. Similarly, when instructed to imagine the clitoris or the vagina being stimulated, the corresponding homuncular sensory cortical regions became activated. Moreover, in the case of each body region studied, the imagery procedure activated the sensory relay region (VPL) of the thalamus. Surprisingly, when the participants were instructed to imagine the nipple being stimulated, activations were found not only in the corresponding thoracic homuncular region, but also in the genital sensory cortical region (i.e., the paracentral lobule). Cerebellar and supplementary motor area activations were activated during the imagery procedures. In general, while there was a lower magnitude of signal intensity in response to imagery than to physical stimulation, the reverse was true in the frontal cortex. The present findings are consistent with, and extend to the genital system, recent reports of imagery-induced activation of the sensory cortices in each of the sensory systems.
Three things are worth further noting: firstly, this is simply a poster presentation, which means it hasn't been peer reviewed; secondly, there was no reading erotica involved, just directed tactile imagery. And thirdly, they weren't studying orgasm at all.