Why would a grown man be attracted to adolescent girls?

That was the finding of a 3-year brain science study in which heterosexual men were shown pictures of attractive men and women. Scientists measured their brains’ responses through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

What they found was startling . . .

The very sight of a beautiful woman triggers a pleasure response in a man’s brain similar to what a hungry person gets from eating a meal or a cocaine addict gets from a fix.

Beauty is working similar to a drug.
~ Dan Ariely, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management

Researchers Dan Ariely and Hans Breiter said the study, published in the journal Neuron, “shows that feminine beauty affects a man’s brain at a very primal level, not on some higher, more intellectual plane.”

This is hard-core circuitry, this is not a conditioned response.
~ Hans Breiter, Director of the Harvard Laboratory of Neuroimaging and Genetics

You’ve often heard the expression, beauty is in the mind of the beholder? As it turns out, beauty is in the lower brain of the mind of the beholder. It resides in the primitive part of the reptilian brain, which some people fondly refer to as the croc brain. That’s the part of the brain that processes basic animal instincts: Am I in danger? Should I run? Can I eat it? Should I kill it? Or should I mate with it?

A rather simplified cross section of the human brain.

In other words, this is not us at our smartest.

That, however, does not explain why men allow the likes of Jeffrey Epstein to seduce them into sexually abusing beautiful adolescent young girls.

Dan Ariely is now James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University.