You may know what it feels like to have an orgasm – but do you know what it looks like? Now, thanks to a team of researchers at Rutgers University, you can see what an orgasm looks like…at least what the colors look like, and how much the brain is affected.

Nan Wise, a 54-year-old PhD student, sex therapist and associate on the research project, agreed to be the guinea pig. She was hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and stimulated herself while the machine took snapshots of her brain every two seconds, across 80 different regions, The Guardian reported. Professor Barry Komisaruk and his team then spliced these snapshots together into an animated film. The movie is the first of its kind.

Another female subject, Kayt Sukel, who is a science and travel writer, blogged about the experience, for those who care to read about it.

Watching the video, the color scale, which ranges from dark red to light yellow, represents the amount of oxygen that is being utilized in that section of the brain. As the orgasm reaches its climax, the image lights up.

Komisaruk recently presented his research at the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, DC, although it hasn’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal. He hopes that his work will not only allow scientists to understand why some men and women have trouble achieving orgasm, but also understand our body’s reaction to pleasure as a whole.

“We’re using orgasm as a way of producing pleasure. If we can learn how to activate the pleasure regions of the brain then that could have wider applications,” he told The Guardian.

Visualization is courtesy of TheVisualMD.com

Source: Huffington Post