Reports of intimate touch: Erogenous zones and somatosensory cortical organization

Erogenous zones have paradoxical response properties, producing erotic feelings from body surfaces distant from the genitalia. Ramachandran has suggested an intriguing neuroscientific explanation for the distribution of erogenous zones, based on the arrangement of body parts (such as the adjacent positioning of the genitals and the feet) in primary somatosensory cortex (S1). The present study represents the first systematic survey of the magnitude of erotic sensations from various body parts, as well as the first empirical investigation of the S1 theory of erogenous zones, by analysis of whether evaluations of erogenous magnitude from adjacent S1 sites tend to correlate.