It’s likely — but the science is still catching up.
Take a look at the brain scans below, which show different parts of the brain lighting up when parts of the body are touched. The results are from self-stimulation, and while the feeling of a self-stimulated orgasm and a partner-stimulated one feel markedly different, according to Komisaruk, they’re hard to tell apart when shown on an MRI.
“There are cognitive subtleties that brain imaging can’t detect,” Komisaruk said. “Think of people speaking English versus Spanish. Clearly we can hear the difference between the two, but we can’t detect that in the brain. The same parts of the brain are activated. That’s the same for stimulation. But so far our methodology is not subtle enough to pick up those differences in brain activity. Brain imaging isn’t even in its embryonic stage yet. The functional MRI was only developed 25 years ago.”
