Fascinating

. . . the psychological complexity of depleted lust has so far defeated industry giants.

The brain’s interwoven networks are too intricate for the technology to properly view them.

So we rely on rats. And one of the world’s masters of rat lust is Jim Pfaus, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Concordia University in Montreal, who wears hoop earrings and used to sing in a punk band called Mold. The various drug companies, including Tuiten’s, regularly consult with him. A few floors below his office, hundreds of rats court and mate in stacks of Plexiglas cages. Pfaus and his grad students inject the rodents with this or that compound to block one aspect of desire’s biochemistry and isolate another. Or they kill the rats right after a moment of craving or copulation. The brain is then extracted, frozen and shaved into wafers, microns thin, by a device resembling a mini cold-cut slicer. Pfaus peers at these specimens under a microscope to figure out which clusters of neural cells went into metabolic overdrive while the rodent was in a sexual frenzy.

As Pfaus explains it, sexual desire for both women and men seems to begin in two low-lying brain zones: the medial preoptic area, which looks like a pair of minuscule oblong balls, and the ventral tegmental area, which is shaped something like a canoe. From this primitive center, the neurotransmitter dopamine, the molecular essence of desire, radiates outward through the brain. “A dopamine rush is a lust-pleasure, it’s a heightening of everything,” Pfaus says. “It’s smelling a lover up close — a woman inhaling that T-shirt. . . . It’s wanting to have; it’s wanting more.”

Both drugs have a peppermint-flavored testosterone coating that melts in the mouth.

More than one adviser to the industry told me that companies worried about the prospect that their study results would be too strong, that the F.D.A. would reject an application out of concern that a chemical would lead to female excesses, crazed binges of infidelity, societal splintering.


Read article from NYT here.