OLDER PEOPLE AVOID DEMENTIA BY HAVING A GOOD SEX LIFE

EXPRESS

Have SEX to ward off dementia – especially if you're an 'older man' scientists claim

MAKING love may keep your brain tip top, reveal scientists.

By BECKY FLETCHER

  Feb 16, 2016

Sex and dementia: Having a healthy sex life could help brain health

Getting frisky between the sheets could benefit your brain health, according to a Coventry University study.

Older men who enjoyed regular love-making showed signs of a healthier brain.

In particular, they were able to recall lists and recognise patterns.

The research team quizzed 6,800 people aged 50-89 from across England.

They were asked about their sex lives and set a number of mental tests.

Participants were played a list of ten words and asked to recount them after five minutes. They were also given a number sequence with one number out of place and asked to correct the pattern.

The men who were sexually active scored 23 per cent higher on the word tests and three per cent higher on the number puzzles.

But it wasn’t just the men who benefitted from a healthy sex life. Sexually active women also scored higher on the tests.

Researchers believe sex hormones, like dopamine and oxytocin, which are linked to the part of the brain responsible for reward, could help cognitive function.

They said: “The findings have implications for the promotion of sexual counselling in healthcare settings, where maintaining a healthy sex life in older age could be instrumental in improving cognitive function and well-being.”

The study was published in the journal Age And Ageing.

By Roy Masters
Author of "Hypnotic States of Americans"
October 2, 2015
NewsWithViews.com

Sexual Overload

When it came to learning about sex as a boy, the best thing that ever happened to me is what didn't happen. I didn't learn about sex until the age of 15 when I went to work in my uncle's diamond factory. I remember listening with some fascination to my fellow employees' tales of conquest and asking myself, if I had a young daughter, would I let guys do things like that to her? Having decided clearly that I would not, I looked upon my own impulses and knew that I could not do to other men's daughters what my nature would lead me to do. What those young men saw as fun and pleasure, I saw as terribly degrading to women. Because I was old enough and mature enough to look beyond my newly awakened feelings, I retained my innocence which protected me like an impenetrable bubble.

It was like constantly being chaperoned by my conscience.

I was lucky. Not having been pushed/seduced into sexual awakening at a too tender age, I was able, like many of my generation, to wait for the right time and place to express that side of my nature, and to avoid a great deal of heartache, disease and tragedy in the process. Today's children are not so lucky. They are literally bombarded with sex from every direction – TV, film, music, peer pressure. But perhaps the worst violators of all are the sex education classes taught in schools – the very institutions we depend on to prepare our children for the future.

Let us explore what happens to the innocent mind of a young boy or girl when confronted with explicit sexual material.

First, let's acknowledge an important point: We are all born with a basic, indwelling standard of decency – a knowledge of right and wrong, a conscience – which by its very nature has the power to hold sway over unruly passions. But it is equally true that a child can all too quickly be separated/seduced from that standard through intimidation or shock – the kind of shock a child experiences when exposed to graphic sexual material.

That is why the kind of guidance children receive is so important. It can either confirm the promptings of their conscience and set them firmly on the right track, or it can contradict the child's conscience and instead become the source of corruption itself. That is exactly what has happened in the nation's classrooms.

Once the child has been separated from his inner standard by being sexually awakened prematurely, he becomes hopelessly dependent on the seducer for the guidance he can no longer find from within. Under the banner of education, teachers have become seducers – corrupters of innocence who usher young people into forbidden sexual experiences that lead to teen pregnancy, abortion, sexual diseases, and mental and emotional problems.

Consider the effect of a Playboy centrefold on a young boy; or the effect on a female child of seeing her dad's nakedness; or the shock a young child experiences while hearing his parents groaning in the next room – even a three year old senses the meaning of the sounds without completely understanding them.

A child drawn too early into that adult world of sensuality is faced with two ‘choices’: unhealthy expression of his overpowering impulses, or unhealthy repression. Gone is the hope of incubating a natural discipline to be exercised at an older age. A ten year old who has been shocked by sexually explicit information, finds his mind endlessly fixated to increasingly vivid sexual images, to the point where these images compel expression. One can quickly see the problems this presents to a child: A young boy may develop a desire to molest his younger sister in order to experiment safely on someone weaker than himself who doesn't have the consciousness to shame him about what he's doing, and can't get him into trouble. If he does gratify his ego through sexual activity, he feels greater conflict and emptiness, and, strangely enough, ever stronger waves of uncontrollable sexual desires, accompanied by frustration, dissatisfaction, and rage.

When a child's sexual nature is awakened too soon, he is simply not able to put the sensuous giant back to sleep, and so lives in a terrible nightmare. Only people who have gone through it and have overcome their problems can really understand the debilitating, paralyzing fixation to sexual fantasy that possesses so many young minds – to the exclusion of work and study. Indeed, children can become so preoccupied with sex that they can no longer function in school – no wonder Johnny can't read.

Once a child is sexually awakened, he gravitates toward society's "sexperts" who eagerly assure him that every new impulse is perfectly normal. It's all approved under the umbrella of self expression.

A child is extremely vulnerable to these ideas – especially when presented by adults in positions of authority – as he has not yet developed the ability to shield himself from dangerous influences.

Consider the nightmares young people sometimes have after watching a horror film. A child cannot make an objective appraisal of what he is seeing; the images of terror gain entrance to his mind and excite his imagination, and only parental comfort and assurance can dispel their frightening power. But unlike the horror film images that fade quickly in the light of day, graphic sexual images continue to hold the child's mind captive as he is helplessly assaulted by them in the classroom, time after time.

Today's sex education classes are actually a form of child abuse, which systematically tears down a child's modesty – his protective barrier against obscene/intrusive influences. When this barrier collapses and a person is seduced into his imagination, right choices are no longer available. It is like falling into an Alice in Wonderland world of feeling in which every door leads farther away from reality. Emotional/sexual arousal blocks the youngster's mind from making rational choices that could lead to truly human relationships, rather than blind animal attachments. How can a child remain unscarred when exposed to demonstrations of nudity, genital anatomy and graphic descriptions of the mating process? All this sexual overload violates the soul and creates a terrible conflict in the young child's mind.

Young boys are not told they must be gentlemen with young ladies. Instead, they are given explicit sexual instruction but they have no easy way to undo the damage to their psyches.

The biological facts of sex are readily observable and do not require years of study – the animal kingdom supplies abundant opportunities to observe the basics. It is not the knowledge, but the responsibility that goes with the knowledge that makes a person more than an animal. Knowledge is acquired from the outside, but the wisdom to deal with that knowledge comes from within. Sexual knowledge without responsibility can destroy a child's character, his personality, his feelings about the opposite sex and his entire view of life. Regardless of the positive image family planning groups have created, the unadorned truth is that these organisations seduce young people into premature sexual activity, and then exploit that failure by providing a means to fulfill their victims' growing addiction to excuses, contraceptives and abortions.

The clinics that bring their messages into the schools may not consciously be cultivating a market for their products, but that is precisely what they are doing – at the price of a child's innocence. They reduce others to an animal level – something easily accomplished when a child is sexually indoctrinated at a young age – and appeal to their base nature, first by awakening the sensuous desire, and then by nurturing it – while gaining power for themselves.

The saddest part of all this may be that a child's natural trust in authority, represented by teachers, is completely betrayed. Instead of truly educating a child – a process by which a child's natural curiosity about life is nurtured so that he may unfold from within – today's sex educators have become corrupters who, with smiles on their faces, drag their victims into a world of sexual license, moral relativity, and perversion. This is first degree murder of the soul. If only we understood the importance of protecting our children from those who would rip the veil of modesty from them. Children need to know that love is more than sex, people are more than animals, and relations between people must be governed by moral laws. What differentiates man from animals is conscience, from which emanates a common sense code of decency and self control. Obeying this deep impulse leads to self reliance, moral fortitude and character – the fertile soil in which individual selfhood and true freedom can flower.

Reverse the process, override the inner law, and say goodbye to civilization.

[Editor's note: This article was used as briefing material in the British Parliament during our last Conservative majority government, when the House of Lords voted for the right of parents to withdraw their children from sex education classes, to include those introduced as HIV education. The House of Commons also approved the legislation and this fundamental right under law has subsequently withstood a number of insidious attempts to abolish it.]

The mystery of the female orgasm

From the existence of the G-spot to the origin of multiple orgasms, female sexuality once mystified scientists. But as Linda Geddes discovers, radical experiments are finally revealing some answers

By Linda Geddes

26 June 2015 SOURCE:-(http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150625-the-mystery-of-the-female-orgasm)

On my washing machine, there is a lock. To activate it, you must hold down the start button for a particular length of time at just the right intensity; too soft and nothing happens, too hard and the machine beeps angrily at you. Once you’ve mastered the technique, it’s easy; the lights switch on, things start moving and the cycle ultimately climaxes in a shuddering whirling crescendo of noise. Finally, an entangled heap of damp but refreshed clothes tumbles out at the other end. But for the uninitiated, it’s a perplexing mystery.

Consider now the female orgasm. JD Salinger once wrote that “a woman’s body is like a violin; it takes a terrific musician to play it right”. Pressed or caressed the right way, a woman can be transported to such ecstasy, that for a few seconds, the rest of the world ceases to exist.  But get it wrong and pain, frustration, or dull nothingness can ensue. It’s a stark contrast to a man’s experience; so long as they can get an erection, a few minutes of vigorous stimulation generally results in ejaculation.

Why are orgasms so intensely pleasurable? How come women can experience multiple orgasms? And does the fabled G-spot even exist? These are some of the most enduring mysteries of medicine. “We are able to go to the moon, but we do not understand enough about our own bodies,” says Emmanuele Jannini at the University of Rome Tor Vergata – one of those who has spent his career trying to unravel it. Recent years have seen a flurry of studies by these real-life Masters of Sex, and they are finally getting some answers.

Brains on fire

Perhaps the scientists’ greatest skill is in persuading women to sweep aside their inhibitions, and masturbate – or even copulate – under the full glare of scientific research, including the uncomfortable environment of the fMRI scanner. One of the leaders of this research has been Barry Komisaruk at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who wanted to probe whether brain differences can explain why women and men experience sex so differently.

It turns out that despite their varied experiences, both men and women show roughly the same neural activity during orgasm. “The similarities between men and women at orgasm are far greater than the differences,” says Komisaruk. “What we see is an overall activation of the brain; basically it’s like all systems go.”

This may explain why orgasms are so all-consuming – if the whole forest is blazing, it’s difficult to discriminate between the different campfires that were there at the start. “At orgasm, if everything gets activated simultaneously, this can obliterate the fine discrimination between activities,” Komisaruk adds. It is maybe why you can’t think about anything else.

Women's brains still receive signals from the genitals after orgasm, allowing them to climax multiple times (Credit: Getty Images)

There are hotspots in this furnace, however. One is the nucleus accumbens, a brain region that deals in pleasure and reward through the release of a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Given the choice, rats will choose electrical stimulation of this brain region over food - to the extent that they would allow themselves to starve to death. Besides sex, it’s also activated by cocaine, amphetamine, caffeine, nicotine and chocolate. No wonder orgasms make you want to keep on going back for more.

After orgasm, however, some important differences do emerge, which might begin to explain why men and women react so differently after climax. Komisaruk, with Kachina Allen, has found preliminary evidence that specific regions of the male brain become unresponsive to further sensory stimulation of the genitals in the immediate aftermath of orgasm, whereas women’s brains continue to be activated: this may be why some women experience multiple orgasms, and men do not.

Anatomy of pleasure

If these brain scans have generated some controversy, it has been nothing compared to the attempts to pin down the anatomy of the orgasm. The penis has just one route for carrying sensations to the brain, the female genital tract has three or four. At the seat of female sexuality is the clitoris: familiar to most as a small, pebble-shaped nubbin, plonked in an awkward position, a centimetre or so in front of the vaginal opening. Precisely who discovered the importance of this structure is up for debate. Ice-age clay models, known as “Venus figurines”, depict a faceless woman with large breasts, a rounded belly, a prominent vagina and labia – and on one model, a clitoris.

It wasn’t until the 16th Century that the clitoris began to be described as a distinct physical structure, common to all women, with the function of inducing pleasure. In his book, De re anatomica, published in 1559, Realdo Columbo described the clitoris as “the seat of a woman’s delight”. Yet in subsequent centuries, female pleasure took a back seat, and the clitoris was largely forgotten – at least by anatomists and physicians. It re-emerged in the 20th Century, but was still regarded as inferior by many.  Though Sigmund Freud at least acknowledged that women can experience orgasm, he believed that clitoral responsivity is superseded by vaginal orgasm in mature women. The inability to experience vaginal orgasms is associated with psychosexual immaturity, he wrote.

Can science reveal why women and men experience sex differently? (Credit: Getty Images)

If that were true, then there would be an awful lot of women out there who just aren’t realising their sexual potential.  Between thirty and forty percent of women claim never to have experienced an orgasm through vaginal penetration alone – though many more can orgasm through clitoral stimulation.

The suggestion that the vaginal orgasm is somehow superior has irked many feminists. It sounds as if women who don’t experience vaginal orgasms just aren’t trying hard enough. So should vaginal orgasms be a rite of passage for all women, or just a privileged few? Is it even possible to have an orgasm in the absence of a clitoris?

Barry Komisaruk took the first steps to answering these questions by chance, while he was studying mating behaviours in rats. One day, while inserting a rod into a female rat’s vagina, he triggered a bizarre response: “As soon as I touched the cervix, the rats would become rigidly immobile,” he says. Not only that, but during this kind of stimulation, the rats became apparently insensitive to pain. Soon afterwards, he switched his rats for women, and noticed the same thing: vaginal stimulation blocked the transmission of pain. But how?

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