Featured Image Credit: Kayt Sukel
To quote When Harry Met Sally..., "I'll have what she's having."
While the late Rob Reiner's 1989 romantic comedy shocked audiences when Meg Ryan's titular Sally pretended to have an orgasm in the middle of a restaurant, it turns out that's not the most unlikely place you can climax.
We recently covered the couple who had sex in an MRI scanner to give us a more intimate look at the human anatomy during intercourse, but what about the woman who went it alone to have an orgasm inside the piece of medical equipment? Of course, this was all for science...not just pleasure.
Unlike being warned about 2025's dangerous 'gooning' trend, orgasms are a perfectly natural part of sex, designed to help men reproduce, although women don't need them to ovulate.
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Some theorize that the female orgasm is a leftover positive effect from evolution, while others suggest it's there to encourage them to have more sex.
One person who knows all about having the intimacy of her orgasms studied is Kayt Sukel, who explained to The Guardian what happened when she got her rocks off in an MRI scanner.
As research for her book called Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex and Relationships, she volunteered to help Rutgers University's so-called orgasm researcher, Barry Komisaruk.
Considering you're told to keep still during an MRI, and you might've noticed how cramped it is in there, Sukel says one of the biggest challenges was trying to orgasm while being as still as possible.
With her being locked into a breathable plastic mesh helmet that was screwed to the bed of the scanner, Sukel admits she didn't realize how much she wriggled around during an orgasm. Prior to the big day, she undertook plenty of practice.
Komisaruk also used sex therapist Nan Wise for the experiment, mapping Wise's brain in an animation that culminated (and climaxed) in a five-minute movie.
The study aimed to discover what goes wrong when men and women can't reach sexual climax, but this wasn't a problem for Wise as she enjoyed a 'crescendo of activity'.
Charting 80 different regions of the brain in snapshots that were captured every two seconds, the movie used a 'hot metal' color scale that started with dark red for a lack of activity and progressed to white for periods of most activity.
In a separate interview with The Guardian, Komisaruk said: "The general aim of this research is to understand how the orgasm builds up from genital stimulation and what parts of the brain become recruited and finally build up into an orgasm."
When the orgasm arrives, activity spikes in the cerebellum and the frontal cortex, followed by a peak in the hypothalamus and a release of oxytocin that gives the sensation of pleasure. At the same time, there's a peak in the nucleus accumbens linked to reward and pleasure. Eventually, we see things calm down.
Musing about the process, Komisaruk concluded: "It's a beautiful system in which to study the brain's connectivity. We expect that this movie, a dynamic representation of the gradual buildup of brain activity to a climax, followed by resolution, will facilitate our understanding of pathological conditions such as anorgasmia by emphasising where in the brain the sequential process breaks down."
