The neuroscience of scattered arousal—and what it reveals about nervous system regulation

You know the feeling. Your body's doing the thing. The situation is right. Your partner is present, attractive, willing. And somewhere between "this should be working" and "why isn't this working," you realize you've been running a mental inventory of tomorrow's obligations for the past three minutes.

You're not broken. You're not bad at sex. You're exhibiting a specific neurophysiological pattern that researchers at the University of Padova just mapped with EEG and heart rate monitors—and what they found explains why some people can sink into erotic experience while others keep floating to the surface.

The Study That Caught Something Real

Francesca Fusina, Marco Marino, and Alessandro Angrilli published a paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience in June 2025 that did something clever: they selected 50 women from a pool of 422 based on emotion regulation capacity—half scoring in the top 15% for dysregulation (difficulty managing emotional responses), half in the bottom 15% (highly regulated). Then they showed both groups emotionally evocative film clips while recording 64-channel EEG and continuous heart rate.

The clips included erotic content—non-pornographic depictions of sexual intercourse designed to activate the appetitive system. What the researchers wanted to know: does the nervous system of a dysregulated person respond differently to erotic cues than a regulated person's?

The answer was yes. And the difference was precisely the opposite of what you might expect.

Citation: Fusina F, Marino M and Angrilli A (2025) Heart rate and EEG gamma band connectivity in the ventral attention network during emotional movie stimulation in women with high emotion dysregulation. Front. Neurosci. 19:1599349. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1599349

The Bradycardia of Desire

Here's what a regulated nervous system does when it encounters something erotically interesting: it slows down.

This is called stimulus intake bradycardia—heart rate deceleration in response to salient stimuli. The body is saying: this matters, let me take it in. It's the physiological signature of absorbed attention, of settling into experience rather than mobilizing against it.

The low-dysregulation women in Fusina's study showed exactly this pattern. During erotic clips, their heart rates dropped. Simultaneously, their brains showed increased connectivity in the alpha band—the frequency associated with relaxed, focused attention—particularly in networks connecting the Ventral Attention Network (VAN) to other brain regions.

The VAN is the brain's "pay attention to this emotionally relevant thing" system. It includes the right inferior frontal gyrus and right temporo-parietal junction, with deep connections to the insula and amygdala. When something matters—when it's biologically salient—the VAN lights up and coordinates with other networks to process it.

In regulated women, erotic content triggered coordinated slowing: heart rate down, alpha connectivity up, attention focused inward on the experience itself.

The Acceleration Problem

Now here's what the high-dysregulation women did instead.

Their hearts sped up. And their brains showed a completely different connectivity pattern—positive correlations between heart rate and gamma-band activity spreading across multiple networks. Instead of focused intake, diffuse activation. Instead of slowing into the experience, accelerating away from it.

The gamma band (30-50 Hz) is associated with active processing, task-relevant communication between brain regions, and—critically—bottom-up attentional capture by distracting stimuli. When gamma connectivity increases across multiple networks simultaneously, the brain isn't settling into one thing. It's being pulled in several directions at once.

And there's more. When asked to rate their emotional state after viewing, the high-dysregulation women reported significantly more embarrassment during erotic clips than their regulated counterparts. Same content. Same viewing conditions. Radically different subjective experience.

Their nervous systems weren't reading erotic cues as opportunity. They were reading them as something closer to threat.

The Autonomic Architecture of Arousal

This is where the neuroscience meets the phenomenology of actually having sex.

Polyvagal theory—Stephen Porges's framework for understanding autonomic states—describes three distinct modes the nervous system can occupy: ventral vagal (safe, social, connected), sympathetic (mobilized, activated, fight-or-flight), and dorsal vagal (shutdown, collapsed, dissociated).

Here's what matters for erotic experience: you need sympathetic activation and ventral vagal safety simultaneously. Arousal requires the accelerator—blood flow, heart rate increase, engorgement, all the physiological correlates of sexual response. But it also requires the social engagement system to stay online, the felt sense of safety that allows vulnerability.

Sympathetic activation plus ventral vagal connection equals erotic experience.

Sympathetic activation without ventral vagal connection equals anxiety, hypervigilance, threat.

The physiology is nearly identical. The interpretation depends entirely on whether the vagal brake is engaged—whether the nervous system feels safe enough to let arousal be pleasure rather than danger.

What Fusina's study demonstrates is that high-dysregulation individuals show exactly the pattern you'd predict from this framework: sympathetic activation (heart rate increase) decoupled from the settled attention that would allow erotic experience to land. Their bodies are doing something, but it's not the something that leads to presence.

Why "Just Relax" Doesn't Work

If you've ever been told to "just relax" or "get out of your head" during sex, you've experienced the futility of conscious override for autonomic states.

You can't think your way into parasympathetic dominance. The ventral vagal system doesn't respond to verbal commands. It responds to cues—prosodic voice tone, facial expression, physical warmth, rhythmic co-regulation with another nervous system.

This is why technique is almost irrelevant compared to safety. The fanciest moves in the world won't help if your nervous system is reading the situation as threat-adjacent. And the simplest touch can be electric if the autonomic system is in the right state.

The dysregulated nervous system isn't making an error. It's doing exactly what it learned to do—stay vigilant, monitor for danger, keep resources available for mobilization rather than sinking into vulnerable absorption. At some point, this was adaptive. In the context of intimacy, it's the thing preventing intimacy.

Arousal Non-Concordance Enters the Chat

There's another layer here that the Fusina study illuminates indirectly: the phenomenon of arousal non-concordance.

Genital response and subjective arousal don't always match. The body can respond to sexual stimuli—increased blood flow, lubrication, erection—without the person feeling aroused. And someone can feel intense subjective desire without corresponding genital response.

This is normal. It's not dysfunction. The systems are somewhat independent.

But for dysregulated individuals, non-concordance becomes confusing and often shame-inducing. The body is doing something, the mind is somewhere else, and the gap between them feels like evidence of brokenness rather than what it actually is: two partially independent systems operating under different constraints.

The high-dysregulation women in Fusina's study showed exactly this pattern—sympathetic activation (body responding) alongside embarrassment and scattered attention (mind not settling into the experience). Their nervous systems were doing something with the erotic cues. Just not the thing that produces presence, connection, or pleasure.

The Barbell of Erotic Experience

There's a structural pattern here that shows up across domains: the barbell.

One end: safety. Parasympathetic capacity. The regulated baseline that allows settling. Trust, predictability, the felt sense that this situation is not a threat. This is the anchor that makes everything else possible.

Other end: intensity. High arousal. Sympathetic activation. The edge-play territory where sensation gets dialed up and the nervous system is asked to hold more than usual. This is where peak erotic experience lives.

The forbidden middle: anxious arousal that goes nowhere. Not calm enough to settle. Not activated enough to tip into genuine intensity. The scattered, embarrassed, hypervigilant state where you're technically present but functionally absent. This is where the high-dysregulation pattern lives—and it's where most "get out of your head" problems actually reside.

The barbell structure is why safety enables intensity rather than constraining it. A nervous system that can return to regulated baseline can afford to push further into activation. A nervous system that can't find baseline hovers in the anxious middle—never quite relaxing, never quite igniting.

What Actually Helps

The Fusina paper points toward interventions, though the researchers are careful not to overprescribe from a single study: heart rate biofeedback, neurofeedback, and psychoeducational approaches that help individuals understand and work with their autonomic patterns.

But the deeper implication is about the kind of attention erotic experience requires.

Not willpower. Not technique. Not performance.

Settled attention. The kind that comes from a nervous system that feels safe enough to slow down, take in, absorb. The kind that the low-dysregulation women showed naturally—heart rate dropping, alpha connectivity increasing, attention focusing inward on the experience itself.

This isn't something you can force. But it is something you can cultivate. Through practice. Through relationship. Through the slow work of teaching a nervous system that it's safe to settle.

Co-regulation matters here—the presence of a partner whose nervous system is itself regulated can help tune your own. This is why the who of sex often matters more than the what. Some partners feel regulating. Others feel activating in the anxious direction. The difference isn't chemistry in the romantic sense. It's chemistry in the literal sense: two autonomic systems either finding synchrony or not.

The Honest Limitation

The Fusina study has constraints worth naming. Sample size was small—25 women per group. The population was homogeneous—female university students in Italy. The head model used for EEG source localization relied on templates rather than individual brain scans. These are standard limitations, not fatal flaws, but they mean the findings are preliminary rather than conclusive.

What the study does provide is a clean demonstration of differential nervous system response to erotic stimuli based on regulation capacity. The pattern is physiologically coherent, theoretically grounded, and consistent with what clinicians observe in practice.

And it offers something important: a framework for understanding "can't get out of my head" experiences not as personal failure but as autonomic pattern. The nervous system doing what it learned to do. Which means it can also learn something different.

The Landing

Erotic experience asks something specific of the nervous system: settle enough to take in, activate enough to feel alive, hold both simultaneously.

For some people, this comes naturally. For others—the high-dysregulation pattern Fusina and colleagues mapped—it requires learning. Not learning technique. Learning regulation. Teaching the body that it's safe to slow down in the presence of something intense.

The heart rate tells the story. Bradycardia for those who can sink in. Tachycardia for those who can't stop monitoring.

Same cues. Different nervous systems. Radically different experiences.

The good news is that nervous systems are plastic. What's learned can be unlearned, or at least expanded. The vigilance that once served survival can be updated to include contexts where it's safe to be present.

The work isn't sexy. It's slower than anyone wants. But it's the work that makes the sexy part possible.

The research: Fusina F, Marino M and Angrilli A (2025) Heart rate and EEG gamma band connectivity in the ventral attention network during emotional movie stimulation in women with high emotion dysregulation. Front. Neurosci. 19:1599349. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1599349