Frequent Sex May Improve Your Memory, Study Finds

There are plenty of health benefits to having regular sexual contact. It can lower your blood pressure, reduce the risk of types of cancer, lift your mood and even possibly be a cure for headaches and other mild pains. But if all that isn’t enough, now there’s another unexpected benefit to having penetrative vaginal sex regularly.

It is thought that recent research has suggested that women who have more sex have improved memory, specifically in remembering abstract words presented to them. Though these findings may seem a little random and pointless, the more you think about it, the handier it becomes. With a good memory for words, your vocabulary will expand, offering up better speaking, reading and writing skills.

So what led to these results being found?

At McGill University, seventy-eight straight women were asked to take part in the study that found these results. In the past, studies have found that more regular sex can increase memory capabilities in general, but this study strived to find a more solid link.

The participants – who were aged between eighteen and twenty-nine, and all considered to be healthy – were asked to recall words and images of faces. It was found that there was a definite correlation between how many words they remembered and how frequently the participants engaged in sexual intercourse. The images of faces didn’t seem to affect the results. For this reason, the researchers concluded that there was more of a connection between recollection of abstract words and the regularity of sex.

After the results were published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour, the researchers began to look deeper to see why these results came about. It is now thought that sexual intercourse can encourage the growth of tissues around the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a part of the medial temporal lobe, and as well as being associated with influencing emotions, this part of the brain is thought to be essential to memory functions.

So what does this mean? Well, it’s possible that if sexual intercourse increases the tissues in the hippocampus, that long-term memory functions will be destined to improve. Language is controlled in the hippocampus, which is why when it begins to deteriorate with age, issues such as dementia come about. If sexual intercourse can encourage the opposite effect, then it’s likely that language will improve, and our vocabularies can expand.

However, one thing is left unexplained; if the hippocampus is directly linked to sex and the recollection of words, why did the participants fail to improve their memory of the faces they were shown?

There’s a simple explanation.

The hippocampus isn’t responsible for every type of memory. It is thought that despite it dealing with language, spatial awareness and emotion, tissue improvement wouldn’t aid the hippocampus in recalling faces because it simply isn’t its job. The brain is a complex organ, and finding correlations with memory, and certain functions is a difficult task.

Perhaps at some point in the future, scientists will figure out what can improve facial recognition, but for now, it’s good to know that having regular sex can improve some brain functions!

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About the Author: Hayley Anderton is a Creative Writing graduate from Liverpool. She’s a freelance writer and the self-published novelist of the LGBT YA book, Double Bluff. She doesn’t go anywhere without a notepad and has been writing ever since she can remember. Her other interests include baking, talking about politics and feminism, and snuggling up with her cat. She has dreams of traveling the world with her best friends, and of being a well-known author someday.