Monday, Apr. 28, 1941

Brain on Sex

Libido, the technical name for sexual desire, is not triggered by the glands, but by the brain. So Neurologists John Mills Brookhart and Frederick Lemuel Dey of Northwestern University told the American Physiological Society in Chicago last week.

Engineer of the sex instinct, they said, is a nickel-sized area of tissue at the base of the brain called the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus throws the switch for all man's primitive emotions--rage, fear, desire. Normally the hypothalamus is checked by the more civilized cerebral cortex. But sometimes the leash is broken and the hypothalamus runs wild, ignoring, as a neurologist once remarked, "refinements of decency and convention."

For their studies in sex, Drs. Brookhart & Dey went to the guinea pig. They short-circuited the hypothalamus in nine animals, produced indifference to females in seven. (The other two, who managed to sire four litters, were not as severely injured as their companions.) The sex glands of all the animals remained in healthy condition. Loss of interest in sex, concluded the scientists, was due to a change in the guinea pigs' "mental outlook."

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