To unlock the secrets of the climax researchers are looking behind the scenes and into the nervous system, where the true magic happens.
By Regina Nuzzo
Los Angeles Times — Health Section
February 11, 2008
AS they seek to document and demystify one of life's great thrills, scientists have run across some real head-scratchers.
How, for example, can they explain the fact that some men and women who are paralyzed and numb below the waist are able to have orgasms?
How to explain the "orgasmic auras" that can descend at the onset of epileptic seizures — sensations so pleasurable they prompt some patients to refuse antiseizure medication?
And how on Earth to explain the case of the amputee who felt his orgasms centered in that missing foot?
Peek inside the skull of a couch potato watching reruns on TV and you’ll see non-stop patterns of blood flow throughout the brain. If you learn to pick out which activity patterns match up with, say, a good belly laugh, then you might be on your way to reading the viewer’s internal experiences. Recently, experts from a variety of fields competed to glean subjective perceptions like humor from functional MRIs of TV viewers. They were surprisingly successful. 
A team headed by Peter Fromherz, PhD, a director at Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich, has developed a computer chip that can measure the activity of thousands of neurons at a time. “We can get a movie of a complete electroactivity map in space and time, with a resolution of eight micrometers,” Fromherz says. The work was published in the September 2006 issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology. 