Diana Peragine

I mean, I also do want to stress, though, too, before we get into fixing it, sort of how important it is to target these experiences at this particular window of time, right?

I mean, you know, interest in sex, it first comes online in adolescence.

It's a hallmark of adolescence sexual experimentation.

It's, you know, normative from a sort of demographic standpoint.

It's expected from an evolutionary one that will, you know, behave sexually at this time.

in the same way that, you know, it's inspected almost in the same way that the infant brain expects to be exposed to language, to attachment figures, and might be primed to learn from them, right?

But most importantly, our adolescent sexual experiences, and this is where we get to the brain side of the equation, actually tend to coincide with this really interesting window of brain development where the reward circuits that underpin emotion, motivation,

where those circuits mature faster than the sort of cognitive control circuits that inhibit them.

And this imbalance endows positive emotional experiences with special salience, special persistence in memory.

I mean, the films, the books, the movies, the events that we like the best, that we remember the best as adults.

They're often the ones that we discover in adolescence and early adulthood.

So if this reminiscence bump or this memory bump extends to other sources of pleasure, like our very first experiences with sex, they may be the most memorable ones that we ever have and might actually pattern our interest in sex as adults.