What Turns You On? 10 Fascinating Facts About Sexual Attraction

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3. Why the piece of pie in the glass case looks better than the one you’re eating.

Whichever ear your partner whispers those words of love into, the fact is, he does it. He's attentive, attractive (play along here) and always there for you. You’re a lucky duck…and yet…there’s a particular co-worker, one you’d swear is flirting with you, whose shirt is just tight enough to present the outline of a little fantasy, who only pops into your part of the office occasionally. You know it’s not right, but your mind wanders off to that person time and time again, like someone on Silver Alert who can’t remember where home is. 

Cheer up, dummy! There might be a reasonable explanation that someone barely there has your rapt attention. Richard A. Friedman wrote in the New York Times about a brain scan study from 2001 by psychiatrist Gregory Berns that may explain why some people respond to elusive promise rather than constancy. Subjects getting MRI brain scans were given fruit juice and water, but in one part of the study those rewards came every 10 seconds while in the other they came randomly. Berns found the rewards centers of the brain were more highly activated when the rewards came at unpredictable times than when they came on schedule. This reaction was the same for both rewards, juice or water, even if a patient said she preferred one or the other. 

Friedman writes that these reward circuits, when activated, “tells the brain something like 'Pay attention and remember this experience because it’s important.' This circuit releases dopamine when stimulated, which, if it reaches a critical level, conveys a sense of pleasure.” Our reward circuits, Friedman writes, "have evolved over millions of years to aid our survival; new stimuli hold the promise of telling us things we don’t know from which we could benefit.”

From my purely observational standpoint it makes sense that the novel experience would excite the brain to pay attention because it might not come back, whereas something that is always there can always be attended to…kind of the way you listen to breaking news but when you’re watching something that’s been sitting in your DVR since July you know you can get up and wash the dishes because it's not going anywhere.

4. Show us your tips!

Wanting something elusive that you can’t necessarily have is the essence of many types of entertainment, and the lap dancer is right up there; there’s a reason it's called a strip  tease. 

In their book, The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction, authors Brian Alexander and Larry Young detail the work of psychologist Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico who “tracked stripper income across ovulatory cycles.” The results show that our drawing power is highest when we’re fertile. The strippers who got the most tips were the ones at or near ovulation. From the book:

The effect Miller discovered wasn't small or subtle; he calls it "shocking...." When the strippers Miller chronicled were in estrus, they made about $354 per five-hour shift. Anestrous women made about $264 -- a difference of $90. Menstruation cut dancers' earnings in half. The difference can't be attributed to one woman's attractiveness over another's, or to fashion choices, because the research took place over two months. The estrous and anestrous women are the same women, documented at different points in time….”

But how would the men know the women were ovulating? They didn’t -- consciously.

“When men have been exposed to odor samples taken from women at or near ovulation, they, like their monkey cousins, show a spike in testosterone, compared with men who sample odors taken from women who aren't ovulating. The close contact required for conversation in a noisy club might be giving the men olfactory hints.”