“When people see violent or erotic images, they fail to process whatever they see next, according to new research. Scientists are calling the effect ‘attentional rubbernecking.’ ‘We observed that people fail to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after viewing neutral images,’ said Vanderbilt University psychologist David Zald. The effect is akin to rubbernecking on the highway, Zald and his colleagues say. Your brain might suggest you watch the road ahead, but your emotions force you to look at the accident on the side of the road. Research subjects were handed a stack of pictures that included pleasant landscapes and architectural photos. They were told to search for a particular image. Negative images were placed anywhere from two to eight spots before the search target. The closer the negative image was to the target picture, the more frequently people failed to spot the target. In a follow-up study, negative images were replaced by erotic shots. The effect was the same. ‘This suggests that emotionally arousing images impact attention in similar ways whether they are perceived as positive or negative,’ said colleague Steven Most of Yale University. The researchers suspect we can’t control the effect.” —LiveScience.com (US)

One of the more controversial stories in recent months has been the one about the guy killed as a result of injuries he sustained when being sodomized by a horse. Somebody posted a link in the comments of the story that points to a video showing a man being, yes, ass-fucked by a big ole horse. Presuming that this isn’t your particular fantasy, it can be pretty awful to watch and also to hear since, as another commenter pointed out, the recipient’s grunts and groans suggest that this act of sodomy didn’t feel pleasureful in any stereotypical sense of the word.

However jaded you are, it’s hard to imagine you can watch this video without experiencing a strong dose of “attentional rubbernecking.” It takes a few minutes to process what you saw. You have to sit down and rub your forehead, or turn to somebody else and make a black joke about it — if, that is, you happen to have someone nearby with whom you can discuss suicidal sorts of human-animal sexual interaction.

And while it would be hard to recommend that people watch this or any similarly disturbing video, in a way it serves a purpose. Why? Because there is a pro and a con to attentional rubbernecking. The con is that it’s a distraction. Speaking strictly logically, you have to wonder if billboards featuring sexual subjects contribute to automobile accidents. On the other hand, the pro is that people obviously seek out and get off on attentional rubbernecking. It’s fun to have your horizon filled up with a sort of safe horror, and that’s why people go to slasher flicks and play violent video games…

And read PervScan. Face it. Half of what you read here is a watered-down thrill. Often the real events involve pain, humiliation, and sorrow. But these get processed through some news organization, and then PervScan cracks a dark joke or two, and the end result is that the events themselves are sanitized, diminished, made safe for consumption. You can laugh about a guy weird or foolish enough to ram a horse cock the size of a man’s arm into his ass because you forget that, beneath the story, there is still a man who died, a family both saddened and ashamed, friends and coworkers left wondering how the person they knew could have maintained such a bizarre secret life.

It really makes you wonder. How would you react if you were to see video — or to see in reality — the most disgusting sex crime of the year? Or a man rape a child so young that the disparity in size results in an injury whereby the girl’s intestines are left hanging between her legs? Or a mother pouring bleach down her daughter’s throat and then suffocating her simply because she lost her virginity?

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