A Billion Wicked Thoughts
What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire

"The world's largest experiment," as anyone who's encountered this book's hype machine knows well, is neither an experiment nor the world's largest anything. It is two neuroscientists trying to quantify and analyze online porn, and this breezy non-scientific book seems to have been written before th......more

At times fascinating at times infuriating always engaging. The book starts with an excellent premise, which is that the internet has opened up a world of data which can be mined by researchers, in this case neurologists, to examine heretofore unexplored aspects of the human psyche. I have not looked......more

3.5/5 stars. Interesting analysis of human sexuality based on peoples web searches. The key takeaway is that men and women have different sexual cues; men are visual whereas women require narrative stimuli to be sexually activated. My only beef with the text is that I found their analysis to focus o......more

This is a very insightful book. It crushes my hope that I will ever fully understand my wife. At the same time it brings peace to me, because it is not that I'm not trying hard enough. The abyss between men and women is huge beyond imagination. A must read.......more

Those of you who are following along at home may recall our last selection on the "sex" theme--Bound and Gagged, Laura Kipnis' most excellent close reading of pornography. A Billion Wicked Thoughts approaches the question of desire from a totally different direction. Using their background in data m......more