"Dorm room confidential"
"Pregaming is where you go out first, get loosened up, and then have some fun somewhere else," says Shana, a gorgeous 21-year-old. "You don't even worry about who you're going to hook up with until later." The crew at UF also partied in a pattern: We started at someone's house, went club hopping, and then headed back home, where couples started peeling off. This pattern taps into a powerful form of psychological reinforcement and seduction, says Arthur Aron, Ph.D., a psychology professor at Stony Brook University, in New York.
"It's called misattribution of arousal," Aron says. "You attribute your current state of anxiety or arousal to the person you're with, instead of to the situation itself." In other words, as sensation-seeking students move from one location to another, they expose themselves to new environments, new people, new music, and new games (Guitar Hero and Wii Sports video games have usurped beer pong as of late), all of which keeps their minds and bodies in a state of arousal. Suddenly, the guy or girl who might have seemed only cute 4 hours ago has become smoking hot.
When this happened in college, you probably thought you had a case of beer goggles. But in reality, you simply had a flood of dopamine swishing around your midbrain. "Any kind of general arousal increases activity in the dopamine tract," says Elaine Hull, Ph.D., a professor of neuroscience at Florida State University. "This tract drives all motivated behavior. So if you're excited and in the presence of food, you'll want to eat. And if a prospective partner is present, it can motivate sexual behavior."
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