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With its expansive range and unprecedented potential for anonymity, (the Internet gives voice to our deepest urges and most uninhibited thoughts. Inspired by the wealth of unfettered expression available online, neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, who met as Ph.D. candidates at Boston University, began plumbing a few chosen search engines (including Dogpile and AOL) to create the world's largest experiment in sexuality in 2009. Quietly tapping into a billion Web searches, they explored the private activities of more than 100 million men and women around the world. The result is the first large-scale scientific examination of human sexuality in more than half a century, since biologist Alfred Kinsey famously interviewed more than 18,000 middle-class Caucasians about their sexual behavior and published the Kinsey reports in 1948 and 1953. Building on the work of Kinsey, neuroscientists have long made the case that male and female sexuality exist on different planes. But like Kinsey himself, they have been hampered by the dubious reliability of self-reports of sexual behavior and preferences as well as by small sample sizes. That is where the Internet comes in. By accessing raw data from Web searches and employing the help of Alexa-a company that measures Web traffic and publishes a list of the million most popular sites in the world-Ogas and Gaddam shine a light on hidden desire, a quirky realm of lust, fetish, and kink that, like the far side of the moon, has barely been glimpsed. Here is a sampling of their fascinating results, selected from their book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts.

A new study suggests that a single dose of psilocybin -- the active ingredient in "Magic Mushrooms" -- can result in improved personality traits over the long term. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found that individuals who received the drug once in a clinical setting reported a greater sense of "openness" that often lasted 14 months or longer, according to study published this week in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. The study defined openness as a personality trait that "encompasses aesthetic appreciation and sensitivity, imagination and fantasy, and broad-minded tolerance of others' viewpoints and values." It is one of five main personality traits that are shared among all cultures worldwide. Of the 51 participants, 30 had personality changes that left them feeling more open. Other personality traits (extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness) were not impacted. Only the participants who said they had a "complete mystical experience" while on the drug registered an increased sense of openness. "The mystical experience has certain qualities," lead author Katherine MacLean said. "The primary one is that you feel a certain kind of connectedness and unity with everything and everyone." Because personality traits are generally considered to remain stable throughout a persons lifetime, researchers are excited about therapeutic implications of the study. "[T]his study shows that psilocybin actually changes one domain of personality that is strongly related to traits such as imagination, feeling, abstract ideas and aesthetics, and is considered a core construct underlying creativity in general," study author Roland R. Griffiths told USA Today. "And the changes we see appear to be long-term."