A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us about Sexual Relationships

Two maverick neuroscientists use the world's largest psychology experiment — the Internet — to study the private activities of millions of men and women around the world, unveiling a revolutionary and shocking new vision of human desire that overturns conventional thinking.

For his groundbreaking sexual research, Alfred Kinsey and his team interviewed 18,000 people, relying on them to honestly report their most intimate experiences. Using the Internet, the neuroscientists Ogas and Gaddam quietly observed the raw sexual behaviors of half a billion people. By combining their observations with neuroscience and animal research, these two young neuroscientists finally answer the long-disputed question: what do people really like? Ogas and Gaddam's findings are transforming the way scientists and therapists think about sexual desire.

In their startling book, Ogas and Gaddam analyze a billion wicked thoughts on the Internet: a billion Web searches, a million individual search histories, a million erotic stories, a half-million erotic videos, a million Web sites, millions of online personal ads, and many other enormous sources of sexual data in order to understand the true differences between male and female desires, including:

• Men and women have hardwired sexual cues analogous to our hardwired tastes — there are sexual versions of sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter. But men and women are wired with different sets of cues.
• The male sexual brain resembles a reckless hunter, while the female sexual brain resembles a cautious detective agency.
• Men form their sexual interests during adolescence and rarely change. Women's sexual interests are plastic and change frequently.
• The male sexual brain is an or gate: A single stimulus can arouse it. The female sexual brain is an and gate: It requires many simultaneous stimuli to arouse it.
• When it comes to sexual arousal, men prefer overweight women to underweight women, and a significant number of men seek out erotic images of women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.
• Women enjoy writing and sharing erotic stories with other women. The fastest growing genre of erotic stories for women are stories about two heterosexual men having sex.
• Though the male sexual brain is much more different from the female sexual brain than is commonly believed, the sexual brain of gay men is virtually identical to that of straight men.

Featuring cutting-edge, jaw-dropping science, this wildly entertaining and controversial book helps readers understand their partner's sexual desires with a depth of knowledge unavailable from any other source. Its fascinating and occasionally disturbing findings will rock our modern understanding of sexuality, just as Kinsey's reports did sixty years ago.

“A goldmine.” Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature

“Fascinating and terrific.” Roy Baumeister, coauthor of Willpower

"An amazing book." Daniel J. Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music

“Alfred Kinsey only scratched the surface. Interviewing a mere 18,000 horny humans? Please... Drs. Ogas and Gaddam [offer] hot new scientific findings.” The Washington Post

"An enjoyable, exhaustive, and often insightful look at what turns us on — sure to excite readers." Kirkus Reviews

The Book on Sex

Want to know what really turns your partner on? A Billion Wicked Thoughts offers the clearest picture ever of the differences between male and female sexuality and the teeming diversity of human desire. What makes men attracted to images and so predictable in their appetites? What makes the set up to a romantic evening so important for a woman? Why are women’s desires so hard to predict? Neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam reveal the mechanics of sexual relationships based on their extensive research into the mountains of new data on human behavior available in online entertainment and traffic around the world. Not since Alfred Kinsey in the 1950s has there been such a revolution in our knowledge of what is really going on in the bedroom. What Ogas and Gaddam learned, and now share, will deepen and enrich the way you, and your partner, think and talk about sex.