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childofbaud comments on Open Thread: October 2009 - Less Wrong
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For you non-techies who'd like to be titillated, here's a second bleg about some very speculative and fringey ideas I've been pondering:
What do you think the connection between motivation & sex/masturbation is?
Here's my thought: it's something of a mystery to me why homosexuals seem to be so well represented among the eminent geniuses of Europe & America. The suggestion I like best is that they're not intrinsically more creative thanks to 'female genes' or whatever, but that they can't/won't participate in the usual mating rat-race and so in a Freudian manner channel their extra time into their art or science.
But then I did some googling looking for research on this, and though I didn't turn up much (it's a strangely hard area to search), I ran into some interesting pages on the links between motivation & dopamine, and dopamine & sex:
Which suggest to me an entirely different mechanism: it's not that they have more time, it's that they are having much less sex (even if only with their hand), and this depletes dopamine less & leaving motivation strong to do other things they'd like to do. (Cryptonomicon readers might also be familiar with this theory from one memorable section with Randy.)
So: does anyone know any research testing this? As I said, I couldn't find much.
The conjecture you offer here has been floating about in philosophy and psychology circles for some time. It was a view heavily promoted by Freud, who used the term sublimation to describe the diversion of unfulfilled (sexual) desires into constructive pursuits. A search of this term may yield further findings.
Hm, yes, I was a bit familiar with Freud, but I was hoping for ties to biochemistry; it's one thing to intuit that the mind has n bits of energy & forces sloshing around and if they can't come out in sex they have to come out elsewhere, and entirely another to have a specific, materialist model of what's going on. I haven't found anything for the latter.