Sex in the Brain by Amee Baird

I was anxious and at the same worried to read and review Sex in the Brain by Amee Baird

because in our family we spent terrible and serious experiences connected with brain strokes and other illness so it's a thematic I feel closely.

I found the book not just readable for every reader, also the most prophane ones, but also captivating, humoristic under many aspects, and written with passion. 

The author, a clinical neuro psychologist in fact, keep the topic, she interviewed wagons of people or familiars in contact with people afflicted by various brain illness, or with serious pathologies, in a light way so that people can understand, without to feel too much stress, and at the same time having some fun sometimes.

I had read when I was 17 a psyhologic book where the author, an American one asserted that maybe we won't never discover the most intimate secrets of our brain because brain is our thinkable organ and so he wants to hide to all of us his most profound secrets.

Maybe it is true, but this author thanks to a voyage in the existential experience of people tries to understand the most of it.

We speak of sex in this book an activity that should be in a daily base constantly in our mind, because like eating and sleeping a primordial activity of men. Not only: without sex no one would exist; children are the extension of our existence.

In most cases, when there are illness, brain injuries, or tumors affecting brain, or when there are operations for sorting out difficult cases in epileptic cases, we can assist at a complete different vision and mutation of behavior regarding sex from these patients.

In particular people operated in the right emisphere of brain for removing epileptic brain cells later tends to develope a drastic change of partner, sometimes becoming homosexual, so changing genre and experiencing new way of loving. 

Not only: the situation of difficult epileptic patients with many seizures, and not curable without operation create a condition of dependance and various family members will care for them. When the problem is sorted out, not just the patient will experience a new freedom under many different ways, but psychologically also the various carers who lived with the idea of taking good care of their sick familiars must change their vision and sometimes it's difficult to re-adjust the roles portrayed for so many years or decades.

I this book you'll read the clinic case of a lady who became compulsive regarding a star, collecting all his posters, dvds, etc, not admitting that the man was dead and dreaming of meeting him; there is the experience of a girl who, after that she made love with her partner, she completely forgot where she was. You can think that she wanted to delete that sexual making experience because delusional. No, no: it was a case of amnesia sorted out successfully.They were married, so a solid couple. That sex session you will read caused this problem.

There are also studies conducted through the most important available exams now, and I confess that here I laughed thinking at these "hardcore" MRI's and EEG's in which people during these exams stimulate sexually themselves or with the help of the partner for trying to see the effect that an orgasm has in their brain and the modifications during the orgasm in their brain; which areas are more awoken compared to other ones, and which ones should be "fixed". Differently it's possible to see which areas are giving hyperactivity or create too much sexual sleeping mood in a person.

Our brain still remains the most surprisingly and unknown organ of our body and "cheating" it remains a big fight.

Absolutely beautiful!

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori