Madeline’s Reviews > Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life > Status Update

Incentive salience: wanting. The generic accelerator of the emotional brain; it feels the desire to move towards something or away from it. When wanting is activated with a stress response mechanism, we search for safety. With attachment mechanism, we seek affection. With sexual accelerator, we pursue sexual stimulation.

3 bad experiences vs 3 good

- specifically, what made them bad or good? Internal state, external circumstances, etc.

“You learn the language you’re surrounded by. Similarly, you learn the sexual language you’re surrounded by. Just as there are no innate words, there appear to be almost no innate sexual stimuli. What turns us on or off is learned from culture in much the same way children learn vocabulary or accents from culture.”

“You know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.”

Interesting metaphor about our minds/bodies/beings as garden plots that are tended to by our family/parents/etc., with certain seeds planted, plants cared for, etc. to describe the preconceptions were raised with about our bodies, others, and internalized shame

“This is what science can do for us, if we let it. It offers us an opportunity to lower our defenses and experience the ways that we are all connected.”