What fires together wires together

I’m reminded of a case study that describes an individual who had come to associate sexual arousal with being covered in insects. As a child, that individual had been locked into closets for unimaginable amounts of time, and during those times, bugs would frequently fill the space and crawl on him. The child, trying to seek some sort of escape from the reality of his experience, found comfort only in sexual release—even though he was too young to even know what sex was or meant. His body knew only that it felt good, and it provided the only possible escape available to him. In his mind, those associations became, quite literally, wired together.
--Roger Thompson | The Atlantic | December 19, 2014
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/12/times-up-for-timeout/383897/

*new tag: "kink"