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For couples who masturbate on occasion or regularly, sex with yourself can:

— Be empowering, especially by helping you to feel better about your body, genitals and sexual response.

— Deliver some of your most intense orgasms ever, which you’ll now know how to recreate with that special someone!

— Increase your sexual awareness, giving you the opportunity to discover what turns you on – the sensations and movements that work best to give you the greatest of sexual gratification.

— Have the potential to enhance your sex life in general, boosting your sexual confidence and turning you into a better lover.

— Get you or your partner off the hook if neither is available or not in the mood.

Health Benefits for Both Sexes

Masturbation rewards both men and women because it’s:

— The safest kind of sex, keeping you free of sexually transmitted infections.

— A great form of stress relief.

— A mood booster in releasing endorphins.

— A natural sleep sedative.

— A mechanism for building stronger pelvic floor muscles, which can lead to better sex.

— A natural energetic pick-me-up.

Health Benefits for Females

When it comes to a woman’s health, self-pleasuring serves her well by:

— Building her resistance to yeast infections.

— Combating pre-menstrual tension and other physical conditions associated with their menstrual cycles, like cramps.

— Relieving painful menstruation by increasing blood flow to the pelvic region. This will also reduce pelvic cramping and related backaches.

— Relieving chronic back pain and increasing her threshold for pain.

Health Benefits for Men

Research summarized in a 2007 article in Sexual and Relationship Therapy found that masturbation may help men by:

— Improving his immune system’s functioning.

— Building his resistance to prostate gland infection.

— Making for a healthier prostate.

Australian researchers have reported that frequent masturbation may lower a man’s risk of developing prostate cancer. A survey of men found the more frequently a man masturbates between the ages of 20 and 50, the less likely they are to get prostate cancer. In fact, those who masturbated more than five times a week were one-third less likely to develop prostate cancer.

This more relaxed attitude is also due to the medical community challenging its own original claims that masturbation was a serious medical-ethical problem with dire results. According to works like Onania, circa 1712, male masturbation was said to lead to disease or disorder with the loss of semen.

Likewise, in losing vaginal fluid, a female who took matters into her own hands was supposedly at risk for hysteria, jaundice, epileptic fits, and other negative health conditions. Of equal concern, self-pleasuring was thought to send her down the road to sodomy as well.

Anybody with “solo sexploration” experience can tell you that, contrary to popular myths, masturbation does not result in any of the aforementioned, nor does it lead to acne, warts, hair on the palm, insanity, blindness...

What many may not know, however, is that stimulating yourself can ultimately boost your health in many ways.

The utter lack of interest by the education community in the science of learning isn't that much of a mystery. Since the industry is dominated by government agencies the importance of learning is diminished. What's important to the people who run a school district, that kids learn or that next year's budget is greater then this year's?

Kids are measured for the learning they've accomplished but education agencies aren't measured for the learning those kids have accomplished. So why bother with all that tedious scientific stuff? You can suit yourself, fall in love with content-free ideologies and there's never any consequences.

It's the intellectual equivalent of Gresham's Law in which bad ideas drive out good. Good ideas - breakthroughs - result in political/organizational upheaval. Very upsetting to people who've achieved a certain degree of success under the old regime so best ignored in favor of innovations which leave the status quo unmarred.

I tried SuperMemo a few years ago, on a Palm Pilot. My experience was that the user interface was acceptable, though not good, but data entry was too difficult on a Palm. Furthermore, I was using it to try to learn Italian, and I discovered that, yes, it seemed to be good for memorization of words, but it didn't seem to help me string those words together; for that, I still needed my traditional language books and classes.

Perhaps someone who has "[turned his] back on every convention of social life" isn't the best person to be writing software to help people communicate.

Also: the SuperMemo website is terrible. When I first went to it, I thought it was one of those advertising sites that's just lists of other pages. A good interface is important.

I was wondering the same thing as marlborotestmonkey7 - this, to what end? Self realization and personal satisfaction? What's the point in becoming a "genius" if you only reach the goal just before you die? And what "few million" items do you choose to learn? Memorization is not the same as understanding or the ability to apply your knowledge.

Don't get me wrong - I'm very interested in the software and I may try it. Certainly this work seems very valuable. I wonder why he didn't collaborate on it? It would be nice just to be able to license his algorithms and plop a decent interface on top :)

As an educator I found this to be a really interesting article. I'm all for people using the internet to look up facts and question a lot of the rote memorisation that goes on in classrooms, but that doesn't mean that trainees won't need to pick up a vocabulary for the field of study they're engaged with, or an understanding of what things are possible in that field.

Both of these types of knowledge are essential for making good search strings in Google ^_^ and both require a fair amount of memorisation before the student can move from the 'I suck' stage to: 'I rock'. The less time they spend in 'i suck' the more likely they are to persevere and progress to the more interesting aspects of the subject at hand, and Piotr seems to have done some great work in this area.

"So you believe in trying things for yourself?" he asks.

"Yes."

This provides his opening. "In that case, let's go swimming."

At the edge of the sea, I become afraid. I'm a strong swimmer, but there's something about standing on the beach in the type of minuscule bathing suit you get at the gift shop of a discount resort in Eastern Europe, and watching people stride past in their down parkas, that smacks of danger.

"I'm already happy with anticipation," Wozniak says.

"Will I have a heart attack?"

"There is less risk than on your drive here," he answers.

I realize he must be correct. Poland has few freeways, and in the rural north, lines of cars jockey behind communist-era farm machinery until they defy the odds and try to pass. There are spectacular wrecks. Wozniak gives close attention to the qualitative estimate of fatal risks. By graphing the acquisition of knowledge in SuperMemo, he has realized that in a single lifetime one can acquire only a few million new items. This is the absolute limit on intellectual achievement defined by death. So he guards his health. He rarely gets in a car. The Germans on the beach are staring at me. I dive in.

From the business side of SuperMemo, Wozniak's priorities can sometimes look selfish. Janusz Murakowski, one of Wozniak's friends who worked as a manager at the company during its infancy, thinks that Wozniak's focus on his own learning has stunted the development of his invention. "Piotr writes this software for himself," says Murakowski, now a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Delaware. "The interface is just impossible." This is perhaps a bit unfair. SuperMemo comes in eight flavors, some of which were coded by licensees: SuperMemo for Windows, for Palm devices, for several cell phones, even an Internet version. It's true that Wozniak is no Steve Jobs, and his software has none of the viral friendliness of a casual game like Brain Age for Nintendo DS. Still, it can hardly be described as the world's most difficult program. After all, photographers can learn to produce the most arcane effects in Photoshop. Why shouldn't more people be able to master SuperMemo?

"It was never a feel-good product," Murakowski says, and here he may be getting closer to the true conflict that lies at the heart of the struggle to optimize intelligence, a conflict that transcends design and touches on some curious facts about human nature. We are used to the idea that normal humans can perform challenging feats of athleticism. We all know someone who has run a marathon or ridden a bike cross-country. But getting significantly smarter — that seems to be different. We associate intelligence with pure talent, and academic learning with educational experiences dating far back in life. To master a difficult language, to become expert in a technical field, to make a scientific contribution in a new area — these seem like rare things. And so they are, but perhaps not for the reason we assume.

Instead, Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he's working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions. Psychologists have long believed there's a correlation between sleep and memory, but no mathematical law has been discovered. Wozniak has also invented a way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning. He selects a short section of what he's reading and copies it into the SuperMemo application, which predicts when he'll want to read it again so it sticks in his mind. He cuts and pastes completely unread material into the system, assigning it a priority. SuperMemo shuffles all his potential knowledge into a queue and presents it to him on a study screen when the time is right. Wozniak can look at a graph of what he's got lined up to learn and adjust the priority rankings if his goals change.

These techniques are designed to overcome steep learning curves through automated steps, like stairs on a hill. He calls it incremental reading, and it has come to dominate his intellectual life. Wozniak no longer wastes time worrying that he hasn't gotten to some article he wants to read; once it's loaded into the system, he trusts his algorithm to apportion it to his consciousness at the appropriate time.

Many psychologists followed Neisser. But others stuck to their laboratory methods. The spacing effect was one of the proudest lab-derived discoveries, and it was interesting precisely because it was not obvious, even to professional teachers. The same year that Neisser revolted, Robert Bjork, working with Thomas Landauer of Bell Labs, published the results of two experiments involving nearly 700 undergraduate students. Landauer and Bjork were looking for the optimal moment to rehearse something so that it would later be remembered. Their results were impressive: The best time to study something is at the moment you are about to forget it. And yet — as Neisser might have predicted — that insight was useless in the real world. Determining the precise moment of forgetting is essentially impossible in day-to-day life.

Obviously, computers were the answer, and the idea of using them was occasionally suggested, starting in the 1960s. But except for experimental software, nothing was built. The psychologists were interested mainly in theories and models. The teachers were interested in immediate signs of success. The students were cramming to pass their exams. The payoff for genuine progress was somehow too abstract, too delayed, to feed back into the system in a useful way. What was needed was not an academic psychologist but a tinkerer, somebody with a lot of time on his hands, a talent for mathematics, and a strangely literal temperament that made him think he should actually recall the things he learned.

The battle between lab-tested techniques and conventional pedagogy went on for decades, and it's fair to say that the psychologists lost. All those studies of human memory in the lab — using nonsense syllables, random numbers, pictures, maps, foreign vocabulary, scattered dots — had so little influence on actual practice that eventually their irrelevance provoked a revolt. In the late '70s, Ulric Neisser, the pioneering researcher who coined the term cognitive psychology, launched a broad attack on the approach of Ebbinghaus and his scientific kin.

"We have established firm empirical generalizations, but most of them are so obvious that every 10-year-old knows them anyway," Neisser complained. "We have an intellectually impressive group of theories, but history offers little confidence that they will provide any meaningful insight into natural behavior." Neisser encouraged psychologists to leave their labs and study memory in its natural environment, in the style of ecologists. He didn't doubt that the laboratory theories were correct in their limited way, but he wanted results that had power to change the world.

The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn — words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details — don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. When it comes to learning, what really matters is how things fit together. We master the stories, the schemas, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme.

The disadvantage of this comforting notion is that it's false. "The people who criticize memorization — how happy would they be to spell out every letter of every word they read?" asks Robert Bjork, chair of UCLA's psychology department and one of the most eminent memory researchers. After all, Bjork notes, children learn to read whole words through intense practice, and every time we enter a new field we become children again. "You can't escape memorization," he says. "There is an initial process of learning the names of things. That's a stage we all go through. It's all the more important to go through it rapidly." The human brain is a marvel of associative processing, but in order to make associations, data must be loaded into memory.

The answer: too long. In fact, the answer was worse than too long. According to Wozniak's first calculations, success was impossible. The problem wasn't learning the material; it was retaining it. He found that 40 percent of his English vocabulary vanished over time. Sixty percent of his biology answers evaporated. Using some simple calculations, he figured out that with his normal method of study, it would require two hours of practice every day to learn and retain a modest English vocabulary of 15,000 words. For 30,000 words, Wozniak would need twice that time. This was impractical.

Wozniak's discouraging numbers were roughly consistent with the results that Ebbinghaus had recorded in his own experiments and that have been confirmed by other psychologists in the decades since.

Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. He was the first to draw a learning curve. Among his original observations was an account of a strange phenomenon that would drive his successors half batty for the next century: the spacing effect.

Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this finding is trivial; all students have been warned not to cram. But the efficiencies created by precise spacing are so large, and the improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearly the moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have been urging educators to use it to accelerate human progress. After all, there is a tremendous amount of material we might want to know. Time is short.

The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland, but the early twilight does not deter people from taking their regular outdoor promenade. Bundled up in parkas with fur-trimmed hoods, strolling hand in mittened hand along the edge of the Baltic Sea, off-season tourists from Germany stop openmouthed when they see a tall, well-built, nearly naked man running up and down the sand.

"Kalt? Kalt?" one of them calls out. The man gives a polite but vague answer, then turns and dives into the waves. After swimming back and forth in the 40-degree water for a few minutes, he emerges from the surf and jogs briefly along the shore. The wind is strong, but the man makes no move to get dressed. Passersby continue to comment and stare. "This is one of the reasons I prefer anonymity," he tells me in English. "You do something even slightly out of the ordinary and it causes a sensation."

Linguist David Wilkins has documented that the Central Australian community of the Arrernte (pronounced "Ar-un-da") create narratives by drawing in the sand, in what could be interpreted as a visual language. These narratives are sequential expressions with highly developed features. Notably, in comparison to our own culture the Arrernte have no writing system, but call their VL "writing" when asked. Their VL seems to have developed without the influence of writing, which perhaps shows in its structure—it does not feature spatially juxtaposed images like in comics. Rather, it is drawn temporally in one location with structurally simple icons. More interestingly though, these narratives are made in real-time exchanges, drawn into the culturally accessible media of sand.

Part of what makes the Arrernte system so effective is that their landscape provides them with the resource for expression—the sand allows for easy real-time interactivity, without the need for extraneous tools (such as pens or paper). Without that accessible sand, their VL would be forced to take on different structural features to adapt to a different ecological environment or might not have even developed as language at all.

At the same time, the print culture could also have contributed to development of a more widespread visual language. The advantage of print is its potential to reach a large quantity of people not in the same time and space as the producer. Though it may have had constraining effects on the actual structure of the VL, mass distribution has offered many people the exposure necessary for the language as a whole to flourish. Learners may need to contribute more to the language's structure during their development than in a real-time exchange, but they are still provided with stimuli that they can use to develop their own fluency.

However, a print culture alone does not limit widespread regularity. Take for example the generalized style that permeates most Japanese comics, with facial features like big eyes, pointy noses and slender chins. Originally, that style stemmed from the "God of Comics" Osamu Tezuka (who himself emulated Walt Disney). First, his single popular "voice" influenced the styles of several others. In time though, it spread to so many people that it no longer could be identifiable as the way a small group of individuals drew, but fossilized as a "manga style" permeating a culture. At this point, new learners (such as the American children now reading manga) become more interested in learning the generalized system, regardless of the individual authors associated to it.

In contrast, American comics authors by and large have styles that slightly resemble those of other authors, but not to the degree of allowing for a complete generalized style. Widespread regularity would have difficulty emerging in a culture emphasizing originality of style. For instance, recall the many Jim Lee clone artists from the early and mid-1990s. These people started out like those who originally imitated Tezuka—they all shared common styles derived from an individual influence. However, unlike the Japanese example, most Jim Lee clones that have survived continued to develop their own individual styles, using his as a foundation for broader personal development. As a result, they might be systematic in their own work, but have only with tenuous relations to the rest of the language group. Thus, though the print culture might play a role in the exposure that individual "voices" have on the language users, it alone does not determine how the learners of the visual language might develop.

By comparison, this highlights the features of our own modern VL's structure, which mimics the spatial juxtaposition employed in written language to circumvent such real-time interactivity. By having a sequence of panels, VL in comics takes on the spatial characteristics of writing, making it understandable even when preserved temporally. Interestingly, with digital tools, the preservation of a temporally unfurling sequence has become possible, such as in Scott McCloud's The Right Number.

Our cultural views on the medium could also have contributed to the lack of the interactivity in our visual language as well. The current perception grounds VL users to the roles of a print culture—a static state emerging from an "artist" and interpreted by a "reader," most often in a separate time and place than that of the creation. This is a far cry from an interactive exchange using visual material merely as a tool for expression rather than the expression itself. Culturally, such a position comes from the perception of the form as some sort of "Art" as opposed to "Language," again resulting in inhibiting the social interactivity of VL.

Interactivity in visual creation has also been shown to aid learning as well.

Historical findings of graphic representation such as cave paintings, drawings by native cultures, and other such visual expressions could be insta