Eureka! I'm Coming

Picture a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the President's Cabinet. A sensuous crew at work under the table provides low-level stimulation, gently fondling, sucking and playing with penises through open flies and vulvas under pulled-up skirts to ensure the liberation of creative problem-solving energies. Sounds impossible? It's not as fantastic as you might think.

After you extend, multiply, totalize and ultimize your orgasm, is there anything left to do with it? No? Wrong. Research now connects sex with the liberation of creative energies. Brain-wave measurements (electroencephalographs, or EEGs) show that what happens in the brain during orgasm is the same as what happens during creative activity.

Since the late 1800s, we have known that the right and left hemispheres of the brain have different functions. For one thing, the left hemisphere controls the right side of the body and the right hemisphere controls the left side. Experiments on people with brain damage from tumors or head wounds revealed that the left hemisphere is responsible for speech and writing. Interestingly, some people who had suffered brain damage to the left hemisphere could no longer talk, but they could sing. It was not until the Fifties, however, that psychologists began to investigate seriously the functions of the two hemispheres. This work showed that the left hemisphere seems to be concerned with speech, reading, writing, naming, the perception of significant order and mathematical functions. It is wordly, analytical, logical. The right hemisphere seems to be concerned with spatial relations, music, emotion, facial recognition and perception of abstract patterns. It is intuitive, symbolic, holistic and simultaneous. In short: left side logical, right side creative.

Our culture is dominated by the left hemisphere; that is, by rationality. There is a temporary switching over to the right side while doing creative work. This switching over provides the first clue to the relationship of orgasm to creativity.

Everyone has had experiences with a creative problem-solving moment, that flash of insight (known in psychology as the "Aha!" or "Eureka!" experience) when the whole thing clicks. You may have been struggling with a problem for hours or days when, all of a sudden, the answer flashes into your mind. "Of course! Why didn't I think of that before?" Many people who regularly do creative problem-solving work (artists, writers, architects, et al.) have such experiences often and become familiar with what it feels like when an idea comes up from the subconscious and clicks. Some are even able to encourage the click, and then, as it begins to surface, force it back down and let it stew around for a while before letting it up again for an even better click. People who have this experience are aware that it is similar to orgasm during masturbation. While masturbating, you can continuously stimulate yourself until you come, or you can play with your orgasm, stopping the stimulation just before you come, then starting again after the impulse subsides. If you do this once--or, better, several times--the resulting orgasm can be fantastic.

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I spoke with a photographer who described the parallels he feels between sex and photography:

"They seem to be the same thing to me, not sex and photography as art but sex and anything creative. It could be cooking. Both start with a blank canvas and both can produce a euphoric transcendent state. They feel the same psychically, too. You start unfocused, you have to let things happen, you can't force them. I set up a shooting, but then what happens has to come out of an interaction. It's the same in sex. I can't make good sex happen, it has to happen itself. After the sex or the shooting, there is that slow drifting back to the real world."

Actually, the relationship between sex and creativity has long been known. Socrates described passionate love as a madness that is a special gift from heaven. This same special madness was also a possession of the Muses and entered the soul inspiring frenzy and artistic creation. Modern psychologists describe a similar relationship, though often in more prosaic terms. Human-potential pioneer Carl R. Rogers states that the inner conditions needed for creative thought include a lowering of psychological defenses, a lack of rigidity, a permeability of boundaries and an openness to experience. Certainly, those are also prerequisites to good sex. In Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler summarizes much of what is now known about creativity. He describes the creative act as a relaxing of controls to reach a state in which we are indifferent to the rules of logic, contradiction and common sense. At the decisive moment, we are as though in a dream, a reverie, a manic flight, free to drift by our own emotional gravity. The parallel between this description of the creative act and sexual abandon is obvious.

The impressionistic relationship between creativity and orgasm is now confirmed by experiments using EEG, a device that produces on graph paper a series of wavy lines representing brain waves. The EEG has shown that during creative processes, there is a shift in the ratio of brain-wave activity from a dominance on the left side to a dominance on the right side. This change in ratio involves an increase of alpha waves on the left side. Alpha waves indicate a quiet state or an absence of activity. The same shift occurs during drug-induced hallucinatory states. Recent experiments that measured brain waves during orgasm showed the same shift in ratio of activity over to the right side and the same increase of alpha waves on the left side.

A team of psychologists at Rutgers Medical School set up a room with a bed where they wired subjects to an elaborate array of measuring devices. After interviewing a subject, they had him (or her) undress and the team's technicians attached EEG electrodes to his ear lobes and scalp. Next, they attached more electrodes to his chest for an electrocardiograph (EKG) to measure heartbeats, put a thin plastic tube around his chest to measure breathing, a similar tube around his penis to measure engorgement during erection (an infrared diode was attached to a diaphragm to measure blood flow in the women's cervices) and, finally, they put a snorkel in his mouth to measure the CO2 being exhaled. They then left the subject alone in the room with a jar of hand cream, an old 8mm Linda Lovelace film and instructions to go to it, while they retired to an adjoining room to monitor the recording of his vital functions.

The researchers at Rutgers wanted to measure a variety of responses, but their primary interest was in brain-wave activity. After numerous subjects had jerked off for science, the researchers ran the results through computers, applied mean statistical deviations and reached the conclusion that orgasm involves a shifting of brain-wave activity to the right side.

These observations confirm that the type of altered consciousness common to creativity and sex--that is, heightened awareness, feeling of timelessness and exaltation--has a common origin in the right side of the brain. They also suggest that the established social order (associated with the left hemisphere) may be down on sex for the same reason it is down on drug experiences, ecstatic religious experiences and artistic creativity. All are right-hemispheric activities and, therefore, subversive to left-hemisphere domination.

At this point, you might ask two questions. First, just because both orgasm and creativity are right-hemispheric activities, are they really related? Second, if they are related, are there any practical benefits to be gained from knowing about it? The answers to both questions are found in the actual experiences of creative people.

Artists have often had an ambivalent involvement with sex, on the one hand seeming to engage in more of it than the rest of us and, on the other hand, blaming it for robbing them of creative powers. In the movie Annie Hall, Woody Allen quotes Balzac as having remarked with each orgasm, "There goes another novel"; and in an interview with Paul Krassner, publisher of The Realist, Norman Mailer said, "If one masturbates, all that happens is everything that's beautiful and good in one goes up in the hand, goes into the air, is lost." Mailer also equated masturbation with smoking and wrote in Advertisements for Myself about his struggle to quit smoking. But while Balzac and Mailer complained that sex disabled them, they both seemed capable (concluded on page 158)Eureka! I'm Coming(continued from page 138) of enormous creative output.

Freudians furthered the negative correlation between sex and art through their theory that art is a release of neurotically repressed sexual energy. Cure the neurosis and no more art. One study of Vincent van Gogh described his painting as a sublimated form of masturbation that satisfied not only his phallic creative strivings but also his repressed anal drives through playing with the messy, smelly paints. Freud himself was ambivalent about this approach, though he did apply it to Leonardo da Vinci in a controversial book. Today, all but diehard orthodox Freudians have abandoned the theory of art as sublimated sex. In fact, far from being disruptive to the creative process, there is much evidence that sex enhances it. Many artists and writers admit that sex or masturbation is an integral part of their creative pattern.

I interviewed an architect who had not only observed the connection between masturbation and the release of creative energy but also conducted some interesting, if informal, experiments to test that relationship. In his work, he has become sensitive to his own creative process and frequently uses the technique described at the outset of this article (i.e., to let ideas come up near the surface of his mind and then to press them back down into the subconscious to come up a second or a third time before letting them click). He has also observed the similarity between this experience and masturbating and has wondered what would happen if he linked the two.

The architect asked several of his students to participate in experiments. They equipped a studio with slide and film projectors, erotic and pornographic films, sound and recording equipment, biofeedback equipment and the best approximation of a sensory-deprivation chamber they could construct. They took excursions to sex shops and X-rated theaters, explored the effects on their work of viewing erotic films and monitored their reactions with the biofeedback equipment. But the most interesting part of their experiments was the investigation of the effects of low-level sexual stimulation on creativity.

They set up a series of design problems and then rigged up a drawing table so that a woman could work solving the problems on a continuous roll of paper. While she worked, a relay of men was under the table gently eating into her, careful to keep the stimulation light enough so that she wouldn't come: 20 minutes of drawing with stimulation, 20 minutes without, etc. Then the class analyzed the work. There were incredible differences. During sexual stimulation, solutions came quicker, drawings were sharper and ideas were clearer. They got the same results with a man solving the problems while the women stimulated him, and the experiment was repeated several times with members of both sexes, always with substantial improvements in the work except for gaps of a half minute or so at the point of actual orgasm.

The architect summarized his findings:

"A good architect or other creative worker will have a profound flash once every several months. You wait for that moment and spend the rest of the time working out that one insight. With these sexual techniques, you can learn to get that kind of creative insight whenever you need it. The real commodity in the world today isn't oil, it isn't capital, it's creative thought. Stamford, the Hudson Institute, the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Trilateral Commission--they all deal in ideas.

"It's only a matter of time," he continued. "Within ten years, every board room, every intelligence agency, every think tank in the country will be using these techniques. There's no way they can get around it. The results are too spectacular."

These techniques are not available only to artists and people who work for think tanks. They are also available to doctors, engineers, mechanics, students--to everybody. Unlike drugs or computers, they require no special connections and no money. Finding the right woman or man may not always be easy, but masturbation is available to anyone, any time. And sexual stimulation can put you in touch with the resources of the right cerebral hemisphere--intuition, emotional openness, the enjoyment of music and the ability to spontaneously size people up.

Our scenario of the meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the President's Cabinet may, in the near future, no longer be fantasy. In fact, these techniques could also be used for international conferences to put heads of state in touch with their right-hemispheric functions, thus decreasing their reliance on linear rational logic and its military consequences and opening them to their more intuitive and, it's hoped, peaceful sides. G. L. Simons, in The Book of Sexual World Records, writes of a Chinese empress who had heads of state give her head. Any puritanical resistance to sexual stimulation for creative release will quickly be overcome by national competition. We landed men on the moon for fear the Russians might do it first. Surely, we will manage to open some flies under the conference table to assure a world lead in creative thought.

"During sexual stimulation, solutions came quicker, drawings were sharper and ideas were clearer."