Sex, Lies and Data Mining

The concentrated essence of this curious book is contained in its 11th chapter, which attempts to explain what the "Mona Lisa" has in common with Chicken McNuggets, vampire novels and the concluding scene of most pornographic videos. Each of these works of human creativity, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam write in "A Billion Wicked Thoughts," exploits perceptual trickery to arouse and gratify our desires. The enigma of the Gioconda smile; the technologically engineered "crave-ability" of fast food; the alluring, "alpha among alphas" quality of the paranormal hero; that climactic moment beamed to watchers on a hundred million laptop screens: all rely on the artful manipulation of our brains.

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"A Billion Wicked Thoughts" promises to reveal "the truth about what men and women secretly desire - and why." Ogas and Gaddam, cognitive neuroscientists who met as graduate students at Boston University, analyzed a year's worth of terms entered into the search engine aggregator Dogpile between July 2009 and July 2010, and found that 55 million of the roughly 400 million terms were sexual in nature. The authors organized those searches into a ranked hierarchy of categories. "Youth" was No. 1 and "breasts" was No. 4. "Cheating wives," "gay" and "penises" all made the top 10.

Ogas and Gaddam purport to have discovered in this data - with the aid of sex research, evolutionary psychology and comments posted on pornography hubs and other Web sites - "the finite set of sexual cues" (analogous to the five different taste cues our tongues can discern) hard-wired into our neural circuitry that "activate our desire software."

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The book: A BILLION WICKED THOUGHTS
What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire
By Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam
394 pp. Dutton. $26.95.