Full network of clitoral nerves mapped out for first time
Comments
wahern
jychang
Being removed for versions 25 to 38… honestly confirms the feminist narrative of some people being idiots, though.
Like, imagine documentation on object oriented programming being removed because it offended some functional programming folks.
austin-cheney
I am not aware of actual code removal but skirting in that direction there was a movement, just a couple years back, to replace words that had become more offensive than they were in the recent past. One example is renaming master to main.
I am not stating any opinion for or against any words or terms in this context.
pron
Somewhat on a tangent, but when people talk about offensive language in the context of cultural criticism they don't mean terms that cause the people who hear them to be offended but things that may diminish the value of some people in the eyes of the people who hear them. I.e. something is offensive, in this sense, to some group X not if people in group X are offended when they themselves are exposed to it but if people who hear it may come to devalue people in group X. Whether it actually does or does not is another matter. In that sense, the discussion of the clitoris in an anatomy book is not offensive in the same way as the term master, but its absence is. Its inclusion could be offensive in the sense of scandalising some people who see it, but it's not the same sense.
augusto-moura
Renaming things to better names happens all the time, selectively removing something is much worse. Especially for a reference book like Gray's Anatomy
bigstrat2003
It's not even "was", that movement still exists. People are still out there trying to remove terms of art on the basis of the theoretical offense felt by an extreme minority of people. It's ridiculous.
wat10000
That's not even remotely similar.
voxl
I think it communicates maliciousness not idiocy
amirhirsch
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. If you are the editor of Gray’s Anatomy, incompetence is malice.
cheschire
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
mhh__
There is obviously truth to it but it does not confirm the whig interpretation i.e. it was supposedly _removed_ rather than never present
pfannkuchen
This might be the first casual reference I've seen to whig history, is that memeplex picking up steam?
dvfjsdhgfv
> Like, imagine documentation on object oriented programming being removed because it offended some functional programming folks.
Let's not pretend we are fundamentally different from people living in other epochs, just biases change. We literally changed branch names of git repos because some people in one big country felt the naming could be offensive to another group of people.
lopsotronic
Back in the Aughts a large number of home-schooling and educational reform organizations (leaning heavily on the Fundamentalist side of the Christian spectrum) had apparently determined that Set Theory originated in Socialist / Bisexual circles.
"A Beka Book" (now styled "Abeka") was not just the province of homeschoolers, but made its way into the educational and academic curricula in many higher learning institutions.
Unlike "modern math" theorists who believe mathematics is a creation of man and thus arbitrary and relative, A Beka Book teaches that the laws of mathematics are a creation of God and thus absolute, and that A Beka Book provides texts that are not burdened with modern ideas such as Set Theory.
It would have made a great deal less fuss if it didn't turn out that Abeka books were being bought in their thousands with tax dollars. I suppose this sort of thing would barely raise an eyebrow these days. I've been seeing far more avante garde ideas flowing forth in the public-funded wells of the former Confederacy of late.
TripolitianFish
[dead]
bobthepanda
There's a fair amount of modern/modernist-era thinking about bending the chaos of humanity to meet rigid ideal social structures, from about the late nineteenth to late twentieth century. And to be clear, the chaos of the early industrial period led to marked declines in public health, sanitation and the like. Some of these innovations worked reasonably well (the standardization of healthcare and schooling), some of them had unforeseen side effects (replacing horses and their large amounts of fecal matter with cars and invisible pollution), and some straight up did not work (much of the social engineering that went into low-income public housing in the West)
TheOtherHobbes
The left are accused of this far more often than the right are, even though the right own think tanks like Heritage, mega churches,mega news channels like Fox, large parts of academia (esp. economics and MBA culture), most of the lobbying machinery, and most of the bot farms.
While I think the suggestion - popular with left wing academics - that society can be engineered towards perfect fairness from a blank slate is obvious nonsense, it's also true there have been decades of active social engineering towards other ends which were deliberate, organised, and generously funded, and have become so pervasive they're experienced as constant background noise.
bobthepanda
I specifically didn’t mention left vs right because I agree. At least in the postwar era this was mostly done via Rockefeller Republicans in the US, who were okay with popular big spending programs but used them as a means to an end. Think highway building clearing out poor and minority neighborhoods, or making sure that public housing isn’t too comfortable.
Fraterkes
I don’t know about “idiots” but bias towards women was obviously real and prevalent. Treating the idea that that might have influenced medical literature as a “meme” is slightly bizarre to me.
b800h
Bias towards women would be understood by most readers as favouring them. I would have written bias against women here.
JKCalhoun
> Bias towards women would be understood by most readers as favouring them.
We run in different circles I guess.
wahern
The meme is that before [insert your contemporary period] people were so backwards that they would miss something like the clitoris entirely. The meme isn't that people and cultures were prejudiced or biased, but that they were prejudiced in an idiotic way. If you believe that's how prejudice works, then you'll be utterly blind to much contemporary prejudice.
EDIT: Relatedly, The Guardian article sites the statistics about female genital mutilation. And you might think, how could people in this day be so cruel? Well, in some (but not all) of those cultures, such as parts of West Africa, female sexual pleasure is highly valued, a clitoral circumcision involves removing the clitoral hood only, similar to circumcision for men, and is viewed as enhancing female sexual pleasure, specifically for oral sex, an act that lacks any negative connotations. Now, embedded in that narrative might be a deeper, more subtle bias against women, but by not appreciating and grappling with that dynamic you're ignoring and diminishing how many women in those cultures understand feminism, which is its own anti-feminine and culturally centric (i.e. "colonial") bias.
flotzam
Isn't type 1a circumcision (removal of the clitoral hood, but not other parts) very rare? At least that's what the Wikipedia article claims, referencing a 2008 WHO report.
hombre_fatal
What’s your best source that African FGM is about enhancing female sexual pleasure, specifically for oral sex?
IAmBroom
> an act that lacks any negative connotations
If you can imagine that forced genital mutilation without anesthetics lacks negative connotations, as long as it's "for her eventual pleasure".
Good Lord.
lkey
They weren't idiots. And one doesn't have to give Goss the benefit of the doubt, nor his successors. The ensuing 50 years of omission are a clear admission of what the goal was and is.
It is the year of our Lord 2026, men proximate to power are openly speculating about the removal of the vote from all women, the end of no-fault divorce, and laws to enforce a birth rate that increases the prevalence of white skin. None of these policy goals are interested in the clit, or indeed, any health care that doesn't directly contribute to the production of heirs.
So as you pointed out, this omission was done deliberately.
If one points this kind of thing out in a vacuum, you are labelled 'hysterical' or 'doing the annoying meme'. Your reaction of instant scepticism is the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Everything is uphill and 'in doubt' until you find a source that's 'credible'. If no one 'legitimate' ever bothered to write it in a way you, a man, will hear it, then it's yet another harpy shrilling about imagined oppression.
You can imagine how exhausting such reactions are the nth time you have to delicately handle them.
IAmBroom
pembrook has replied that the deletion of the clitoris from Gray's Anatomy is "an internet myth" (but I can't reply to their message, as it has been flagged). They then cited a published paper (Hear Read This), which I scoured to find a reference claiming the size of the clitoris was diminished in some editions (!), but never deleted entirely.
This put enough fire under me to look it up, hoping to prove pembrook wrong. I admit I wanted this feminist-persecution "fact" to be true.
The Internet Archive has one copy in the suspect period (post-1943), the 1944 28th edition by T. B. Johnston. It contains an entry for 'Clitoris' in the index, with 5-6 subheadings about the structure. Clearly, not deleted.
Screenshot of the index in question: https://imgur.com/a/qFfn9gr
pembrook
[flagged]
pfych
> What the hell has happened to HN? Am I speaking with some Russian bot farm trying to breed political radicalization?
Sadly not - check sentiment on X around these topics, heritage foundation etc are pushing all these topics right now
nonce42
This is nonsense, as one can easily verify by looking at Gray's Anatomy (30th edition, 1985) on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/anatomy-of-the-human-body/page/4...
mahogany
> annoying meme in feminism and history generally, that people in prior eras were idiots
This sounds like a strawman to me but I’m not well versed in feminism. Do you have examples? On the topic of science, isn’t the criticism more that women were largely ignored or misrepresented in scientific studies? This doesn’t have to be because the authors were “idiots”.
AlecSchueler
> annoying meme in feminism...that people in prior eras were idiots.
Do you have examples of this? I read a lot of feminist literature and it's not something that's ever jumped out to me.
pembrook
> The clitoris was in Gray's Anatomy until 1947, when it was removed by the editor Charles Gross for the 25th edition.
This is also false [1]. One guy didn't wake up one day in 1947 and decide to remove all references to the clitoris in Gray's anatomy.
It's yet another version of the same internet myth, the goal being to caricature people in the past as cartoonishly evil and misogynistic.
Please never use Huffington Post articles as a primary source.
IAmBroom
Please also don't ask people to Here, Read This on a lengthy citation with no direction.
The item I presume you are intending them to notice is the green-shaded Table 1, 3rd and 4th instances of the word "clitoris" in that paper. It basically supports your claim: HuffPost posted a false "fact".
pseudohadamard
Well duh, Gray's had male editors and none of them could find it.
ElijahLynn
Ironic, from reading the article it actually takes a while to find the research...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.18.712572v1
>>> PDF with the images
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.18.712572v1...
hosteur
This should be the story link.
larodi
Indeed, wonder did OP really read through the article?
Shank
Page 7 [0] of the report seems to indicate that FGM reconstruction actually seems to have negative outcomes post-surgery. I'm surprised by this. I'm also shocked to see how prolific FGM is too (230 million women?!).
[0]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.18.712572v1...
05
> seems to indicate that FGM reconstruction actually seems to have negative outcomes post-surgery.
> Longitudinal data indicate that approximately 22% of women who undergo clitoral reconstruction experience a post-operative decline in orgasmic experience [25, 26]
From [25] abstract: Most patients reported an improvement, or at least no worsening, in pain (821 of 840 patients) and clitoral pleasure (815 of 834 patients)
So, I think the quote needs to be interpreted as surgery, even though beneficial on average, still having a pretty high percentage of negative outcomes (22%) and nerve mapping potentially helping reduce that.
hammock
>230 million women
500,000 in the USA. 98%+ in some other countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_female_genital_m...
TacticalCoder
> I'm also shocked to see how prolific FGM is too (230 million women?!)
And talk to any gyn doc in the west: it's happening among those communities in the west too (but on a lesser scale). In several EU western countries the most common gynelogical surgery act is re-building the hymen (so that the woman can pretend she's a virgin once she marries, often forcibly by her family). You may not have gyn doctors friend but I do. And midwives. And they know.
"... surveys show that the practice of FGM is highly concentrated in a swath of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Horn of Africa, in areas of the Middle East such as Iraq and Yemen and in some countries in Asia like Indonesia, with wide variations in prevalence. The practice is almost universal in Somalia, Guinea and Djibouti, with levels of 90 per cent or higher, while it affects no more than 1 per cent of girls and women in Cameroon and Uganda"
Now from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_on_female_geni...
"FGM is practised predominantly within certain Muslim societies,[13] but it also exists within some adjacent Christian and animist groups.[14] The practice is not required by Islam and fatwas have been issued forbidding FGM,[15] favouring it,[16] or leaving the decision to parents but advising against it."
Let's call a cat: of these 230 mutilated women, a vast majority are muslims. There are 900 million muslim women on earth and nearly 1/4th of them have been mutilated by their community.
Ponder this.
erklik
> Let's call a cat: of these 230 mutilated women, a vast majority are muslims. There are 900 million muslim women on earth and nearly 1/4th of them have been mutilated by their community.
If the point here is that this is an Islamic/Muslim issue, then you'd find this in other Muslim populations. It's an Africa issue. Ethiopia is 60% Christian, yet had a 65 percent rate of FGM. Look at Pakistan, and the levant in general. Very Muslim populations yet very low levels of FGM.
breakingcups
> In several EU western countries the most common gynelogical surgery act is re-building the hymen (so that the woman can pretend she's a virgin once she marries, often forcibly by her family).
Can you source that claim?
selimthegrim
Saudi Arabia does not do FGM. What does that tell you?
filoleg
I am not the person you are asking, but (to me personally) it just says that Saudi Arabia had made massive strides to become a modern 21st century society, as opposed to some of their regional neighbors who still practice FGM on a notable scale.
The fact that SA recently (past ~15 years) passed quite a few reforms that significantly lax old theocracy rules (e.g., women are now legally allowed to drive, they are no longer obligated to wear hijab outside, no male chaperone requirements, western-tier public music festivals and concerts can now be hosted, etc.) only solidified that opinion.
turkey99
Male genital mutilation is very common
telesilla
Respectfully, this article is not about the male experience, it's okay to talk about women without putting men in the story.
zahlman
No, it's important context, and attempting to suppress it does everyone a disservice. Without taking these kinds of points of comparison into consideration, one becomes susceptible to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy , and may become convinced about supposed bias where the evidence doesn't support the claim, contradicts it or even shows the opposite.
Another classic example is the discourse around "missing and murdered Indigenous women" in Canadian politics. It was popular enough around a decade ago to be more or less a set phrase. To listen to politicians and wonks discussing the matter, you would imagine that Indigenous men didn't ever get kidnapped or murdered. As a matter of fact, the statistics showed that it happened to them at over twice the rate of the women. (They also showed that it was not an alarmingly high rate compared to other Canadian populations, and that the perpetrators were usually themselves Indigenous — as you'd expect for generally fairly isolated communities.) But you would get silenced in many places (e.g., banned from the Canada subreddit) for pointing to those statistics.
bondarchuk
To someone who is shocked at the prevalence of female genital mutilation in other cultures, the widespread acceptance of other types of genital mutilation in (probably) their own culture is an important piece of context, I'd say.
drfloyd51
I hear what you are saying. But hear me out. I think their comment is ok.
No one is forced to follow that thread. And the comment does provide additional information.
In fact, I never considered circumcision a form a gender mutilation. Despite being circumcised. But that comment got me thinking about it in a new way. And thinking about GM in a larger context.
benj111
On some levels yes, but if the male experience isn't being talked about, then no.
If we were to talk about domestic violence the automatic assumption is male against female. Ignoring the fact that a third of victims are men. That isn't exactly a small minority, before you take into account that it probably an undercount as no one talks about men getting abused.
The same goes for breast cancer. Men can get it, its almost never talked about.
az226
This is a bad take. If society takes genital mutilation of children seriously, and it gets outlawed in more and more countries, it helps save ALL children from genital mutilation. Only a shortsighted person would see it as a zero sum.
eastbound
Respectfully, if we didn’t shutter men all the time, maybe there would be paradoxically more time for women. Unless we make it a zero-sum game where we’re all extremists who would lose if it makes the opponent lose too.
Mixed school is a bane for men, for example. I’m full on with the Mollahs on this one.
az226
And it is an order of magnitude more common for boys than for girls. And it’s legal to genitally mutilate boys in every single country on the planet.
xtajv
(Nonconsensual) genital mutilation is bad no matter who you are or what parts you have.
Also: If pain becomes a contest, we're all losers.
Also: Thank you for complaining. There is much to complain about. There's so much to complain about that we can sit in a circle and take turns complaining and everybody will probably learn something.
xtajv
Spot to complain that I missed a spot:
(P.S. you can also add a new thread)
xtajv
Spot to complain about intersex genital mutilation:
xtajv
Spot to complain about female genital mutilation:
xtajv
Spot to complain about male genital mutilation:
Markoff
*in the US
Not in Europe.
SoftTalker
presumably you are referring to circumcision, which has recognized benefits.
Anamon
Very weakly supported benefits, to be weighed against quite severe risks and frequent issues.
zahlman
Circumcision is not one thing worldwide.
> Circumcision is prevalent among 92% of men in North Africa and around 62% in Sub-Saharan Africa. In western and northern parts of Africa it is mainly performed for religious reasons, whereas in southern parts of Africa it rarely performed in neonates, instead being a rite of passage into manhood.[22]
> Studies evaluating the complications due to traditional male circumcision have found rates varying from 35% (Kenya) to 48% (South Africa). Infection, delayed wound healing, glans amputation and injury, bleeding, loss of penile sensitivity, excessive removal of foreskin, and death are the major complications reported.[23]
...
> ...There are tribes, however, that do not accept this modernized practice. They insist on circumcision in a group ceremony, and a test of courage at the banks of a river. This more traditional approach is common amongst the Meru and the Kisii tribes of Kenya.[40] One boy in Meru County, Kenya was assaulted by other boys because they wanted him to be circumcised in a traditional ceremony as opposed to in a hospital.[44]
...
> Amongst the Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania, male circumcision has historically been the graduation element of an educational program which taught tribal beliefs, practices, culture, religion and history to youth who were on the verge of becoming full-fledged members of society. The circumcision ceremony was very public, and required a display of courage under the knife in order to maintain the honor and prestige of the young man and his family. The only form of anesthesia was a bath in the cold morning waters of a river, which tended to numb the senses to a minor degree. The youths being circumcised were required to maintain a stoic expression and not to flinch from the pain.[40]
...
> In some South African ethnic groups, circumcision has roots in several belief systems, and is performed most of the time on teenage boys: "The young men in the eastern Cape belong to the Xhosa ethnic group for whom circumcision is considered part of the passage into manhood. ... A law was recently introduced requiring initiation schools to be licensed and only allowing circumcisions to be performed on youths aged 18 and older. But Eastern Cape provincial Health Department spokesman Sizwe Kupelo told Reuters news agency that boys as young as 11 had died. Each year thousands of young men go into the bush alone, without water, to attend initiation schools. Many do not survive the ordeal.[59]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision_in_Africa (includes NSFW images).
[22]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5422680
[23]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3474774
[40]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080906115430/http://htc.anu.ed...
thomastjeffery
Surgery is essentially mutilation, just with a lot of effort to get the patient a positive outcome. Hopefully, this information will help.
saagarjha
I don't see how this provides any useful context.
thomastjeffery
The information for where nerve endings are likely to be will probably help surgeons give their patients a better outcome.
Fraterkes
Dumb question, why do “sensitive” spots on the body need more nerves? Couldn’t you just have the normal touch-sensing nerves and map signals from specific spots on the body to stronger/pleasurable qualia in the brain?
Mordisquitos
Not a dumb question. The shortest (and at a glance unsatisfactory) answer is because it works, and therefore it evolved that way.
Going in detail, first consider that for a feature to be evolutionarily selected for two things have to be true:
1. It must increase the fitness of the organism that carries it, i.e. the likelihood of its carrier having descendants as compared to non-carriers ( or be a side effect of another feature that improves fitness enough to be a net positive, etc etc )
2. It must be inheritable (and, in sexually reproduced organisms, mutually compatible during embryonic development).
One such a feature has reached dominance in a given population, as long as it continues to be important for fitness it cannot really be deprecated in favour of an alternative from scratch, even if that alternative is arguably better.
That's why, for instance, vertebrate ocular nerves connect to our retinas on the inside of our eyeball, resulting in us having a blind spot. Cephalopods, on the other hand, evolved their eyes independently the "reasonable" way, connecing their nerves from behind the eyeball. There's no way a vertebrate could mutate from scratch for its optical nerve to connect to the retina from behind without causing absolute mayhem in embryonic development. Our hacky solution for the blind spot? Let the brain hide it in software.
Going back to your question, some spots of the body being more sensitive than others became critical for evolutionary fitness long before nervous systems were complex enough to generate conscious qualia, let alone enough for them to be consistently involved in decision making. Furthermore, mapping of specific nerves to intensity of feeling on the CNS would imply complex hardcoding of something which is much easier to solve with "this place important, have more nerves", and maybe would even conflict with the fitness benefit of a CNS with enough neuroplasticity to learn anew during the development and lifetime of an organism.
So, in summary, the solution of having more nerves where it matters is simple, good enough, and has no reason to be rolled back in favour of a radically different alternative.
griffzhowl
Nice post. Just this bit:
> Our hacky solution for the blind spot? Let the brain hide it in software.
I would say the solution is just having two eyes, since their respective blind spots don't overlap in the visual field.
I would also say that the brain doesn't hide the blind spots, but rather doesn't pay any attention to them in the first place. There's just a lack of information from them, and this deficit isn't normally noticeable because the other eye makes up for it. I think Dennett explains it that way somewhere, probably in Consciousness Explained
wat10000
The blind spot still isn't noticeable if you close one eye, though. You have to look for it carefully with a specific setup that allows you to detect the discrepancy between what you see and what's actually there.
Jean-Papoulos
>1. It must increase the fitness of the organism that carries it, i.e. the likelihood of its carrier having descendants as compared to non-carriers
This isn't necessarily true. If you map out changes through the history of species, you'll find no significant changes but a lot of diversity for long periods, followed by big changes and low diversity for a short period. That's because during "abundant" times, the population will develop diversity as long as it doesn't significantly hinder reproductive rates. When an environnemental pressure comes up, the diversity dies down because the ones lucky enough to have adaptations that suddenly become useful and reproduce more.
So an animal might get a longer neck, but that doesn't significantly increase reproduction because food is aplenty. It's only when there's a drought that longer necks become an advantage and the trait is now selected for.
Mordisquitos
What you say is correct, and that is why I was referring specifically for what's necessary for "features" (the term I used for "phenotypes" to make it more HN) to become ubiquitous. It is a general rule of thumb in evolutionary biology that the more diversity is observed in a given population for a particular phenotype (e.g. hair colour, height, blood group, etc.) the less relevant it is for fitness within its observed range. When a phenotype is strongly selected for in a given population (e.g. bipedalism, opposable thumbs, the ability to speak) it soon becomes dominant and there is much less diversity.
As to your example about, for instance, neck length during abundant times, that follows the same rule: during abundant times neck length simply does not matter for fitness, therefore (all else being equal) there can be phenotypic diversity in the population.
One caveat though as to how a given phenotype may become ubiquitous without favourable selection is of course genetic drift[0], given a small enough population which is isolated for a long enough timeframe. Eventually that phenotype may become selectively "advantageous" inasmuch as it is no longer compatible with alternatives, and individuals from the isolated population who this phenotype can no longer have successful offspring with individuals of a different phenotype, resulting in speciation. That's what I meant with regards to a "make nerves on important places generate more pleasure/pain in brain" genotype being incompatible with a "have more nerves on important places" one. A hypothetical hybrid creature would be a mess.
Fraterkes
As a software dev, I think this is actually quite a satisfying and sensible answer. A simple reliable hardware solution in favour of a brittle “clever” software one
mcdeltat
> mapping of specific nerves to intensity of feeling on the CNS would imply complex hardcoding of something which is much easier to solve with "this place important, have more nerves"
Not saying your answer is right or wrong, but I don't think this is a sufficient explanation. If the body can differentiate areas enough to produce more nerves in one area, then it could plausibly instead produce fewer nerves which inherently produce a stronger signal - just as we have nerves which respond differently to different stimuli (e.g. heat, light, etc). Also it could be neither and we kinda randomly ended up with what we have because no option was strongly disadvantageous at the time.
yorwba
Having more independent samples helps filter out noise. If you had individual sensory neurons with outsized influence, then misfiring of such neurons would also have outsized influence.
Fraterkes
This makes a lot of sense, thx!
furyofantares
Sounds plausible at least, but I think the question isn't necessarily making a valid assumption. Why do men have to have nipples? Why is our retina installed backwards? Why do sinuses drain upwards? It's just a path evolution took, it doesn't jump to some optimal design.
nine_k
Fingers, for instance, not only have higher sensitivity, but also much higher spatial resolution due to the more dense nerve network.
I can't tell why other areas may have needed higher spatial resolution; maybe it was evolutionary important in the past, and remains today. Or maybe just adding more nerves due to a random mutation correlated with better reproductive outcomes due to a stronger signal, or higher sensitivity, so more nerves are present for no other reason.
xeonmc
Wait, so what you’re saying is, we can use our genitals in a pinch that could be as good as fingers for finesse?
KuSpa
Yes. And the (thought) experiment of reading braille with your clitoris exists. Except youl'ld get horny really quickly.
ndsipa_pomu
Hence the phrase, "Can I use your dictaphone?"
perfmode
Nerve density isn’t mainly about intensity, it’s about spatial resolution. More nerve endings per square centimeter means you can distinguish finer details of touch, texture, and pressure. The brain can’t invent spatial detail that isn’t in the incoming signal. Amplifying a sparse signal centrally would be like zooming into a low-res photo.
The brain does do some of what you’re describing though. The somatosensory cortex gives disproportionate space to certain body parts (the sensory homunculus). So there is central amplification, but it works on top of peripheral density, not instead of it. Without the dense nerve input, you’d basically have an on/off switch instead of nuanced sensation.
tmoertel
> Dumb question, why do “sensitive” spots on the body need more nerves? Couldn’t you just have the normal touch-sensing nerves and map signals from specific spots on the body to stronger/pleasurable qualia in the brain?
Think of a television. What gives you a better picture, quadrupling the number of pixels or making the existing pixels 4x as intense?
throwaway27448
Perhaps encoding "software" is more expensive in terms of codons? So it's cheaper/more likely to "implement" physically.
dboreham
I think you have it backwards. The brain doesn't "know" what's supposed to be sensitive or pleasurable. It boots up with no training data after all. It machine learns what's sensitive due to a combination of nerve density and other factors. We haven't figured out all the other factors yet. But that's why there's a correlation between nerve density and sensitivity: density means sensitivity.
im3w1l
This is just wrong. The brain does instinctively know that some things are good and bad.
colechristensen
Go take a picture in a dark room and edit the photo to try to make it like you've got the lights on in photo editing software. You get a noisy grainy mess and little to no detail.
It's not like evolution would leave a significant amount of signal/noise ratio on the table for all other nerves.
Presuming nerves are already optimized if you want more signal you have to add nerves.
BobbyJo
Sensing nerves aren't especially energy hungry when considering their volume in the human body, so evolution doesn't have much reason to minimize them.
echelon_musk
That 4chan pretends its Hacker News thread still lives in my head.
I still remember "Show HN: Clitly, my app for finding the Clitoris".
glitchc
Thanks for sharing. Hilarious and somewhat accurate...
echelon_musk
Thanks! It must have been the r/programming parody thread I was thinking of as I couldn't find the reference here.
wslh
I remember that Matteo Realdo Colombo (1515-1559) [1] described the clitoris. There is a novel about the story [2] which was the finalist on one of the top Spanish literary prizes [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realdo_Colombo
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Anatomist-Federico-Andahazi/dp/038549...
moralestapia
>Many of the contributions made in De Re Anatomica overlapped the discoveries of another anatomist, Gabriele Falloppio, most notably in that both Colombo and Falloppio claimed to have discovered the clitoris.
Lol. Hard to take that statement serious.
DonsDiscountGas
> her colleagues used high-energy X-rays to create 3D scans of two female pelvises that had been donated through a body donor organ programme.
Would be really interesting to get a few dozen of these and map out the variability. Gotta start somewhere though
luxuryballs
[flagged]
bigmattystyles
[flagged]
ctdinjeu9
[flagged]
mock-possum
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casey2
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> the clitoris did not even make it into standard anatomy textbooks until the 38th edition of Gray’s Anatomy was published in 1995.
This seemed surprising, as it hews too close to an annoying meme in feminism and history generally, that people in prior eras were idiots. And it turns out to be wrong. The clitoris was in Gray's Anatomy until 1947, when it was removed by the editor Charles Goss for the 25th edition. See https://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/cliteracy/embed... Indeed, the clitoris had been depicted in Classical medical books.
Why it was removed--and stayed removed for nearly 50 years--would make for an interesting story about mid-century culture, if not for a cynical throwaway comment, though it seems nobody knows Goss' actual motivations.