Did you ever hear about the time a bunch of people had sex in an MRI machine and it resulted in a scientific discovery?
Buckle up gang, it's time to do some learning.
Dutch scientist Menko Victor ‘Pek’ van Andel wanted to know what actually happened inside the human body when we had sex so he got his fellow researchers Ida Sabelis and her boyfriend Jupp to hop into an MRI machine for some hanky panky.
It was a smidge difficult to pull off as there wasn't a great amount of space in there, but they managed to get it on and learned that the gentleman's penis bends to fit the shape of the woman's vaginal canal during sex.
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This contradicted beliefs from the likes of Leonardo da Vinci that the penis was basically just a straight cylinder during intercourse, but there were other findings from the experiments which scientists weren't able to explain.
According to Vice, Pek continued his research and between 1991 and 1999 he had eight couples and three single women have sex inside a hospital's MRI machine 13 more times, though this time they all boinked in the missionary position whereas Ida and Jupp had been spooning.
All of the men involved had to take Viagra to perform in the rather un-arousing location of being crammed inside an MRI machine, and the research gathered ended up in the British Medical Journal.
Something else besides curved penises they found was that during all 13 instances of sex in an MRI machine, the woman's bladder would rapidly fill up.
They're not quite sure why this happens, but Pek suggested it could be 'evolution’s way to force women to urinate after sex' and potentially 'avoid urinary tract infections', though he's not sure if that's the case, and no concrete answer has been found.
He said: "In every final scan we could see a big, full bladder, even though most of the women went to the toilet before they went inside the MRI."
Ida said the experience of having sex in an MRI machine 'wasn't romantic', though she reckons the fact that only she and Jupp managed to have sex in there without Viagra was 'a testimony to mine and Jupp’s happiness'.
The study itself turned out to be a significant success, and Pek said that while at first people tried to shut down the experiments and shunned the research, they turned right around on it once they discovered people were interested in the results.
"People who’d actively tried to shut us down were later providing quotes to the press, or listing their participation on their resumes," he said.
"Success has many fathers, obviously."
As for some of the things his research told us about the body, we know it happens even if we're not sure why it happens.
Topics: Science, Health, Sex and Relationships
Joe Harker