On the Importance of Being Flexible: Dynamic Brain Networks and Their Potential Functional Significances.

In this theoretical review, we begin by discussing brains and minds from a dynamical systems perspective, and then go on to describe methods for characterizing the flexibility of dynamic networks. We discuss how varying degrees and kinds of flexibility may be adaptive (or maladaptive) in different contexts, specifically focusing on measures related to either more disjoint or cohesive dynamics. While disjointed flexibility may be useful for assessing neural entropy, cohesive flexibility may potentially serve as a proxy for self-organized criticality as a fundamental property enabling adaptive behavior in complex systems.

Neural Responses to Sexual Stimuli in Heterosexual and Homosexual Men and Women: Men's Responses Are More Specific.

Patterns of genital arousal in response to gendered sexual stimuli (i.e., sexual stimuli presenting members of only one sex at a time) are more predictive of men's than of women's sexual orientations.

Neural Correlates of Sexual Orientation in Heterosexual, Bisexual, and Homosexual Women.

We used fMRI to investigate neural correlates of responses to erotic pictures and videos in heterosexual (N = 26), bisexual (N = 26), and homosexual (N = 24) women, ages 25-50. We focused on the ventral striatum, an area of the brain associated with desire, extending previous findings from the sexual psychophysiology literature in which homosexual women had greater category specificity (relative to heterosexual and bisexual women) in their responses to male and female erotic stimuli. We found that homosexual women's subjective and neural responses reflected greater bias towards female stimuli, compared with bisexual and heterosexual women, whose responses did not significantly differ.

Neural Correlates of Sexual Orientation in Heterosexual, Bisexual, and Homosexual Men.

Studies of subjective and genital sexual arousal in monosexual (i.e. heterosexual and homosexual) men have repeatedly found that erotic stimuli depicting men's preferred sex produce strong responses, whereas erotic stimuli depicting the other sex produce much weaker responses.