Is it true that men think about sex every seven seconds?

It is a common assertion that men think about sex almost constantly. We decided to check whether this is supported by scientific evidence.

The statement about the frequency of thoughts about sex in men once every seven seconds has more than once become the reason for the appearance of memes And sketches. This is the time period most often indicate authors of publications in different languages Internet portals, Reddit and in Facebook*. The tendency of men to seven seconds think about sex are discussing and users of question and answer services. IN others sources it saysthat men still think about sex a little less often, but still very often - for example, every minute or six times an hour.

Counting the number of thoughts a person has about any object over a certain period of time is quite problematic. Firstly, each thought as an element of intellectual activity is difficult to record and separate from another. Secondly, it is even more difficult to identify what is contained in each of them.

Solve the first of these problems in 2020 tried researchers from Canada's Queen's University. Unlike their predecessors, who relied on self-reports from volunteers, scientists chose a more reliable method. They placed subjects in an MRI scanner and either showed them different videos or gave them time to rest. So they were able to isolate the phase of the brain when it is focused on one idea (they called this period the thought worm). According to scientists, every day the human brain (provided that he sleeps eight hours) generates and processes about 6,200 thoughts. This study alone disproves the idea that men think about sex every seven seconds. If a man sleeps the recommended eight hours a day, then during the remaining 16 hours of wakefulness, a little more than 8,000 thoughts about sex should appear in his head, although the average number of thoughts about everything in the world, Canadian researchers found, is about a quarter lower.

Determining the content of a thought is a more difficult task. In earlier studies, scientists created average visualizations of areas of brain activity corresponding to a single idea. For each of them, such visualization will be unique - for example, thoughts about dinner at home and dinner at a restaurant, even if in both cases a person plans to eat the same dish, will require activity in different areas of the brain. Creating such visualizations for each thought is a long and expensive process, so to date scientists have only effectively recognized a limited number of thoughts. Canadian researchers abandoned this approach. “Our methods help us detect when a person is thinking about something new, no matter what the new thought is. It could be said that we have ignored vocabulary in an attempt to understand the punctuation of the language of the mind." told one of the authors of the experiment, Jordan Poppenk.

Other researchers have used less expensive methods. In 2012, scientists from Ohio State University at Mansfield tried calculate how often men and women think about food, sleep and sex. 283 student volunteers took part in the experiment. Over the course of a week, they had to press a button on a hand-held counter every time they thought about one of these three things. On average, men thought about sex 19 times a day, while women only ten. At the same time, they thought about food 18 and 15 times a day, respectively, and about sleep - 11 and nine times. Also notable are the “record breakers”: one male participant thought about sex as many as 388 times a day (a little more than every two minutes), while the maximum number of thoughts about sex among women was only 140 (almost every seven minutes). The maximum number of thoughts about food was 111 in men and 53 in women, and about sleep - 253 and 57, respectively. Scientists noted that, on the one hand, thoughts about sex seem to occur to men more often than to women. On the other hand, thoughts about basic needs, which include sex, food, and sleep, are generally more common among men.

Experts note the limitations of the study design: by forcing participants to record thoughts about certain categories, scientists thus implemented the “polar bear” effect. An experiment confirming this psychological phenomenon spent researcher Daniel Wegner. Student volunteers were divided into two groups: participants in the first were asked to specifically think about a polar bear, and participants in the second were prohibited from doing so. All subjects were given hand-held counters—a button had to be pressed every time a thought about this animal arose in their heads. Students in the second group had thoughts about a polar bear more than once a minute - the voiced prohibition stimulated the brain to think only about the forbidden object. Although the experiment on thoughts about sex, food and sleep did not prohibit relevant topics, the very task of the researchers to focus on them may have skewed the results.

Also in 2012, a group of American scientists spent another experiment to understand what people think about during the day. In order not to concentrate the volunteers’ attention on certain thoughts in advance, the scientists asked them to install an application on their phones that would ask seven times a day at randomly selected moments: what they are thinking about now or have thought about in the last 30 minutes. Study participants had to classify their answer into one of 15 categories. True, by thoughts, scientists rather meant desires - the subjects were not thinking about something abstract, but about hygiene procedures, sleep, sex, cigarettes, sports, reading the news, etc. The main limitation of this study was that participants could report no more than seven thoughts a day, so it is impossible to estimate the frequency of thoughts about sex based on this experiment. However, even among the seven thoughts registered per day, sex was by no means the leader. Most often, people thought about food and sleep, but non-alcoholic drinks, media use and various types of leisure activities also occupied their thoughts. The most “asexual” time of the day turned out to be approximately 10 a.m., and the most “sexy” was midnight. In general, interest in sex arose after about 9 pm, but it was usually competed by sleep, alcohol, use of social networks and communication with other people.

Unfortunately, the study did not provide a breakdown of men's and women's thoughts, but based on the proportion of participants (66% women, 34% men), men constantly thinking about sex would still change the overall results quite significantly. There is another significant problem in the methodology chosen by the researchers, namely the issue of the frankness of the participants. If for one reason or another the thought of sex seemed inappropriate to one of the participants, nothing prevented him from noting that during the specified period of time he was thinking about something else.

Although scientists are not yet ready to answer the question of how often men think about sex, the story that they think about it every seven seconds can safely be considered a myth. Firstly, as recent research shows, the average person thinks fewer thoughts per day. Secondly, although men, according to scientists, think about sex somewhat more often than women, this topic by no means constitutes the overwhelming majority of their mental activity - eating and sleeping also occupy men’s minds quite often. Finally, other thoughts and desires also play an important role in the lives of men: from time to time they want to sit on social networks, chat with friends, drink alcohol, have fun, and for some, of course, think about the Roman Empire.

Cover image: iloveimg.com

Not true

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