Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human
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How the Brain Got Its Buttocks: Medieval Mischief in Neuroanatomy
There are so many specializations within the brain sciences that even the sharpest brain has scarcely enough brainpower to learn everything there is to know about itself. But if there’s one fact that the teacup-Yorkie–sized prune in your head might want to ponder, it’s that it shares a peculiar past with something considerably lower in your anatomy—your genitalia. I don’t mean that our brains and reproductive organs share some embryological or evolutionary history, but rather that they were once (and, to some extent, still are) entwined in the language of the body. What this odd story reveals is that the ancient anatomists were major dickheads. We all were, back then. According to ancient nomenclature, even women had penises in their brains.
Régis Olry, an anatomy professor, and Duane Haines, a neurobiologist, brought the whole sordid tale to light in an intriguing pair of articles for the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences. These historians of neuroanatomy (yes, there is such a profession, and we should all be grateful for it) reviewed a very old, circuitous medical literature and found that the human brain was once described as comprising its very own vulva, penis, testicles, buttocks, and even anus. Not surprisingly, it was men doing all the classifying and labeling. In fact, part of the cerebrum is still named in honor of long-forgotten prostitutes—which I’ll get to in a moment.
In their first article over ten years ago, an epoch in academic terms, Olry and Haines revealed the surprising origins of the term fornix. For those illiterate in neuroanatomy, the fornix is an arching band of nerve fibers that connects the hippocampus and the limbic system and spans certain fluid-filled chambers of the brain known as ventricles. You’d have numerous and noticeable problems if your fornix weren’t functioning properly, including serious impairments in spatial learning and overall navigation.
Some basics of etymology. Although today fornix is reserved almost exclusively for anatomical structures—there’s also a fornix of the conjunctivae, which connects the membranes of the eye, as well as several other bodily fornices, but let’s move on—the word originally held an architectural connotation, coming from the Latin for “arch.” Olry and Haines point out that Roman architects during the first century B.C. created wooden rooms with vaulted ceilings, called fornices. When such rooms were made of brick, they were called camerae (there’s a separate etymological history involving the modern-day camera and these brick-arched Roman rooms, but we’re focusing on the fornix here).
Now, none of this is terribly salacious, and it’s quite possible that the first neuroanatomist ever to use this term, the seventeenth-century Englishman Thomas Willis, had nary a dirty thought in mind. But it’s also a fact that the wood-vaulted rooms of old were used expressly for the plying of a particular trade in ancient Rome, prostitution (hence fornication). “The real etymology of the term ‘fornix,’” concluded Olry and Haines, “is therefore related to the form of the roof of the third ventricle, but also to the sexual intercourse which occurred in such rooms, these rooms being compared with this ventricle.” It’s merely an ironic twist that the fornix helps to regulate human sexual behavior as part of the limbic system; as the authors point out, the name was bestowed long before anyone knew this function.
In any event, once they’d put the fornix to bed, Olry and Haines waited another decade or so before they revisited the sexy third ventricle. In a follow-up article, they exposed some more, rather curiously named features from the same part of the brain. When the mid-sixteenth-century Italian anatomist Matteo Realdo Colombo peered into the small recess adjoining the anterior commissure and the dividing line of the fornix’s two columns, report Olry and Haines, he saw what looked like a lubricated vulva—and called it the vulva cerebri. Perhaps that’s not too surprising, given that Colombo is also widely credited as being the anatomist who first “discovered” the clitoris (the real one).
The authors point out there’s a bit of a mystery about precisely which hole Colombo was poking with his Italian probe. It might, in fact, have been the more posterior opening identified by the seventeenth-century Dutch anatomist Isbrand van Diemerbroeck, who found, in Colombo’s groove, “the hole of the anus.” Your brain’s anus, incidentally, is what we’d now call the “common posterior opening” of the midbrain’s aqueduct, which spills into the third ventricle. There are so many defecation-related puns about intelligence to be made here that my mind is cramping up, so, shit, I’ll just leave that part up to you assholes.
Now, van Diemerbroeck didn’t just see lady bits in the brain; if anything, he and his fellow anatomists envisioned it as an essentially hermaphroditic organ. After all, not only did it have a vulva cerebri; it also possessed a distinctive penis cerebri. René Descartes may have celebrated the pineal gland as the “seat of the soul,” but for the less metaphysically minded van Diemerbroeck, as well as one of Descartes’s contemporaries, the Danish physician Thomas Bartholin, that structure was more like a penis. This metaphor may have its roots, explain Olry and Haines, in the position of the gland above and between the brain’s colliculi, which had already been compared with testicles.
This cockeyed term, penis cerebri, proved too embarrassing for future scholars and quickly shrank into disuse. Yesterday’s penis is today’s soulless pineal gland (a stiffer term, to be sure). By the mid-eighteenth century in France, a real buzzkill of an anatomist by the name of Jacques-Bénigne Winslow was already looking back in disgust at his forebears’ indelicate classifications; the ancients, he thought, had their heads in the gutter when it came to what was in their heads. Winslow held these founding fathers of the neurosciences in particular disrepute for their having seen buttocks (eminentiae natiformes) and testicles (eminentiae testiformes) in the colliculi: “The names that were given to these tubercles are very impertinent, and have no resemblance with the things they were derived from.” Others begged to differ, and scholars continued to refer to the buttocks and testicles in our brains for centuries after Winslow huffed and puffed about the matter, even into the twentieth century. Eventually, however, academic prudery eclipsed asinine antiquarianism.
Still, a spunky remnant of those lost days of brainiac debauchery did slip into the present-day vocabulary. According to Olry and Haines, the glandular portion of the pineal gland can be traced back to its bulbous terminological predecessor, the glans penis. Today we know that the pineal gland produces melatonin, a chemical central to regulating your sleep-wake cycle. So the next time you have jet lag, blame it on your penis. And if I haven’t nursed the history of the mammillary bodies—those small round bodies on the undersurface of the brain that are believed responsible for adding smell to recognition memory—that’s only because it’s too easy.
Olry and Haines weren’t the first to scratch their heads over this lurid labeling of neuroanatomical regions. Joining the prudish Winslow in his disdain, the French anatomist Joseph Auguste Aristide Fort observed in 1902 that the anatomists of past centuries “enjoyed giving indecent names to the different parts surrounding the third ventricle.” But Olry and Haines revealed exactly how these medieval anatomists cast their libidinous eyes upon the gray matter and saw not only the glistening engine of our thoughts but also our private parts.
Lascivious Zombies: Sex, Sleepwalking, Nocturnal Genitals—and You
It may seem to you that much like their barnyard animal namesake, men’s reproductive organs the world over participate in a mindless synchrony of stiffened salutes to the rising sun. In fact, however, such “morning wood” is an autonomic leftover from a series of nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT) episodes that occur like clockwork during the night for all healthy human males—most frequently in the dream-filled rapid eye movement (REM) periods of sleep from which we’re so often rudely awakened in the a.m. by buzzers, mothers, or others.
For those with penises, you may be surprised to learn how frequently your member stands up while the rest of your body is rendered catatonic by the muscular paralysis that keeps you from
acting out your dreams. (And thank goodness for that. Carlos Schenck and his colleagues from the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center describe the case of a nineteen-year-old with sleep-related dissociative disorder crawling around his house on all fours, growling, and chewing on a piece of bacon—he was “dreaming” of being a jungle cat and pouncing on a slab of raw meat held by a female zookeeper.) Scientists have determined that the average thirteen- to seventy-nine-year-old penis is erect for about ninety minutes each night, or 20 percent of overall sleep time. With your brain cycling between the four sleep stages, your “sleep-related erections” appear at eighty-five-minute intervals lasting, on average, twenty-five minutes. (It’s true; they used a stopwatch.) As far as I’m aware, there aren’t many well-developed evolutionary theories or a proposed “adaptive function” of NPT, but we do know that it’s not related to daytime sexual activity, it declines (no pun intended) with age, and it’s correlated positively with testosterone levels. Although far fewer studies have examined women’s nocturnal genitals, females similarly exhibit vaginal lubrication during their REM-sleep, presumably with many dreaming of erect penises.
Now, you may not think that such tedious biological details would be fodder for a moral quandary, but you underestimate our species’ massive confusion when it comes to understanding how our coveted free will articulates with our genitalia. Consider the case of a young Frenchman whose sleep-related erection was interpreted by another man as a sign of sexual interest but, swore the former, was nothing of the kind. As described by a group of investigators at the annual meeting of the French Sleep Research Society in 2001, the twenty-four-year-old heterosexual male awoke to his horror with painful anal lesions. Although, having been heavily intoxicated at the time, he had no conscious recollection of any such incident occurring, this led him to deduce that he must have been raped during the night. “The legal medical examination indeed reported on visibly recent tears of the anal margin,” confirmed the researchers.
Then comes the sobering whodunit. Especially disquieting was that the man’s boss had slept over the night before. The two had earlier been lounging in the pool and roasting together in the sauna. There was absolutely no evidence of date rape drugs, but alcohol, as it so often does in the south of France, flowed with relatively gay abandon that evening, and so the straight employee, being a gentleman, had invited his employer to sleep it off on his sofa while he retired to the mezzanine. Apparently, however, it was the employee who slept particularly hard that night, not the inebriated boss. The older man readily admitted that of course they’d had sex overnight, and he could only assume that his colleague’s erection, combined with the fact that the other didn’t resist as he mounted him, suggested that he was a consensual partner. (You thought you were a deep sleeper; imagine the somnambulistic fortitude required to snooze through your first anal penetration.) While the courts tried to sort it all out, the alleged rapist was imprisoned for two years, until finally a judge decided that both men were more or less right and the accused should be set free.
This is but one of many curious examples of sex and law intertwining. The related phenomenon of “sexsomnia” (sleep sex) has witnessed periodic public interest through a spate of high-profile cases, stories that have in turn motivated intriguing academic research on this little-known subject. Even Alfred Kinsey, the grand archivist of carnal facts, while devoting much of his discussions to the subject of wet dreams and nocturnal emissions in both sexes, didn’t mention how some people act out sexually during their sleep.
Unlike the aforementioned case of the sleeping employee being the passive, immobilized recipient in unwanted intercourse, it’s the sleeper who instigates the trouble in bouts of sexsomnia. Although researchers don’t yet have an exact figure on the frequency of this parasomnia, most specialists believe that it’s probably fairly common. Nearly all people who exhibit recurrent sexual acts while sleeping have a history of sleepwalking. In fact, many experts believe that sexsomnia is simply a variant of sleepwalking, which affects 1 to 2 percent of adults, and this is how it’s presently classified in the main diagnostic manual, The International Classification of Sleep Disorders, Revised. Most people do not seek out clinical treatment because of either their ignorance of the condition or their embarrassment, and oftentimes their sexual “automatisms” are innocuous enough—such as fugue-state masturbation, weak pelvic thrusts, or steamy pillow talk. (More on the concept of automatism in a moment.)
In a 2007 issue of Brain Research Reviews, however, the psychobiologist Monica Andersen and her coauthors investigated all case studies that had, at that point, been published in the literature, and they attempted to piece together some common denominators underlying sexsomnia. They found that the most common precipitating factors of sleep sex are sleep deprivation, stress, alcohol or drug consumption, excessive fatigue, and physical overactivity in the evening. Being male and under the age of thirty-five is also a major factor, they reported; furthermore, when women do lapse into this altered nocturnal state, their actions tend to be comparatively inoffensive, moaning and masturbating rather than, like male sexsomniacs, fondling and grinding whatever is unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of their bed that night.
One of the most extraordinary things about sexsomnia is that the sleeping person’s inappropriate behaviors are sometimes directed at people that, during their waking lives, are not particularly arousing to them. In a 1996 issue of Medicine, Science, and the Law, the psychiatrist Peter Fenwick describes the case of an allegedly heterosexual male cadet who was court-martialed for homosexual assault after he’d crawled into bed with another soldier and caressed that private’s privates. The case was dismissed after the court accepted that the absence of an erection in the accused—sexsomnia may or may not involve erections—meant it was unlikely that the episode was “purposeful,” but instead just a bizarre sleepwalking incident. Another example of atypical homosexuality in sexsomnia involved a sixteen-year-old who walked into his aunt and uncle’s bedroom one night and began molesting his adult uncle.
Erections, as I hinted at earlier, complicate matters for the judicial system. One notorious case garnering international media attention, and as reviewed in Current Psychiatry by a group of sleep researchers from the Cleveland Clinic, centered on a thirty-year-old landscaper named Jan Luedecke, who drank far too much at a wild croquet party in the Toronto suburbs one night back in 2003 and fell asleep on a couch. “Some time later,” explain the authors, “he approached a woman who was sleeping on an adjacent couch, put on a condom, and began sexual intercourse with her.” From her terrified perspective, the woman awoke to discover that her underwear had been removed and a glassy-eyed Luedecke was trying to rape her. She pushed him off, ran to the washroom, and returned to find him standing there bewildered. Luedecke, who had an established history of sleepwalking behaviors, was acquitted after the psychiatrist Colin Shapiro testified for the defense that the accused was in a dissociative state when the incident occurred and therefore he was not consciously aware of his actions.
Difficult legal cases such as these hinge entirely on the demonstrability (or at least strong probability) of an automatism—a crime committed during sleep. This is a concept for which Fenwick provided one of the clearest definitions:
An automatism is an involuntary piece of behavior over which an individual has no control. The behavior is usually inappropriate to the circumstances, and may be out of character for the individual. It can be complex, co-ordinated and apparently purposeful and directed, though lacking in judgment. Afterwards the individual may have no recollection or only a partial and confused memory for his actions.
In other words, sexsomniacs are basically lascivious zombies. There’s presently no way to determine with absolute certainty if the phenomenon, when invoked as a defense, was really the cause or just a convenient alibi. Still, certain criteria (detailed sleep-pattern data from a nocturnal polysomnography; sleepwalking and sleep-related sex in the past; known trigger factors, such as
intoxication, fatigue, and stress; timeline of the alleged assault, since episodes typically occur within two hours of sleep onset during non-REM sleep; amnesia regarding the event; no attempt to conceal or “cover up” the incident, but instead confusion) can at least aid a jury in its decision making. It’s tempting, to say the least, to be skeptical that a sleepwalker could act so purposefully as to fiddle successfully with a condom wrapper yet be as conscious as an orthopteran, but the London sleep researcher Irshaad Ebrahim reminds us that sleepwalking behaviors are highly variable and can be very detail oriented, citing people preparing meals and eating, driving motorbikes and cars, even riding horses, all while getting a good night’s sleep.
For those for whom sexsomnia has become a serious problem, in a legalistic sense or otherwise, the good news is that it responds well to pharmaceutical intervention. Just a small dose of benzodiazepines—most notably clonazepam—before bedtime seems to do the trick for most. You might want to consider discussing this with your doctor if you’ve shown a history of sexual violence during sleep or, say, you’re a frequent sleepwalker and there are children in the home. (Several cases have, in fact, involved very unsettling child abuse charges being filed against alleged sexsomniacs.) But sexsomnia can be a problem even for those who live and sleep alone. After five years of waking up several nights a week with ejaculate mysteriously between his fingers, one twenty-seven-year-old was distressed to realize that he was a somnambulistic masturbator. The poor man broke two fingers when his nocturnal alter ego tore off the restraints he’d used to avoid moving in bed.