“Kinky sex lifts our consciousness into a heightened state of “flow,” according to a new study”

Quartz

by Lila MacLellan

American health and sex journalist Michael Castleman has compared BDSM to the child’s game of “trust,” when one child stands in front of another and falls backward, waiting to be caught. It’s a bonding experience, Castleman says, “When the falling player trusts the catcher enough to let go completely, and the catch happens as planned, both players experience a moment of exhilaration that’s difficult to duplicate any other way.”

Now a small study suggests that the exhilarating high from what’s also called “kink” may stem from an altered state of consciousness, and that being a dominant “top,” especially, leads to a state of flow that enhances creativity.

The study, recently published in Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, was conducted by psychologists at Northern Illinois University who recruited 14 experienced practitioners of BDSM, aged 23 to 64, for their research. All the volunteers self-identified as “switches,” people who could be randomly assigned to either role in a BDSM dynamic. They might be a “bottom,” which the study abstract describes as “the person who is bound, receiving stimulation, or following orders,” or a “top,” who provides “stimulation, orders, or structure.”

In what’s probably a rare event in lab studies, the subjects then participated in seven scenes of dominance and submission of different sorts; these involved gentle touching, striking, bondage, and fetish dress. All of the participants provided saliva samples and completed a test that measures cognitive flexibility and processing times, as part of the experiment. They also answered a survey designed to assess their state of consciousness.

Combined, the results suggested that playing a bottom was linked to what’s called transient hypofrontality—an altered mind state when time seems to slow down, and some aspects of a “flow” state, but the latter was more significantly associated with topping and being in control of the scene.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who teaches psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University, coined the term “flow state” in 1990. He once told Wired magazine that it was the feeling of “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake.”

“The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost,” he explained. …