So far, scientists have said that eating chocolate is as good as having sex and working out can give you an orgasm. Now, a latest study says, that expanding your vocabulary can give you a similar high or even better. Strange? I thought so too (how can opening up a dictionary lead to an orgasm?).
According to the study, learning new words or solving word jumbles stimulate the ventral striatum, a core region of reward processing, it is the same area of the brain that gets stimulated during sex, drugs or playing games. True, solving a particularly difficult crossword or being able to form a word that gives us a high score in Scrabble does give one great satisfaction. But the feeling being equated to sex or getting high on drugs for that matter, is debatable.
It’s not that I am not a fan of reading or solving word puzzles. In fact, I’ve been such a geek in school, that I would maintain a notebook where I noted every new word I learnt and its meaning. And now that I recall, it never made me popular with the opposite sex, or plainly put, popular at all. In senior secondary (what is largely defined as junior college), I was part of a literary club, where we would discuss the books we read- that didn’t help me win a place in the popularity charts either.
However this research is quick to point that not everyone can learn new words and get a tiny orgasm in the process. Fair enough. I mean there are very few people who consider reading as a pleasurable activity in the first place, leave alone solving word games for fun.
Science says that only people with higher myelin concentrations will experience the feeling. Simply put the myelin concentrations help carry the rewarding feeling which you get when you learn a word, to the central striatum which is the area of the brain which triggers happy feelings aka orgasm. So this limits the number of people who can equate increasing their vocabulary to making love.
I quite liked this research because now I can solve puzzles without being termed a geek but honestly I don’t see this solving any purpose. I mean unless this particular finding is going to inspire a youngster to pick up a book – the possibility of which I high doubt unless it’s a copy of Playboy – or if you are able to floor a James Bond-esque personality at the bar with your witty word play, this research is pretty much useless. What do you think of a study like this? Leave a comment below and let us know.
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