Everybody’s doing it.

At least, that’s how it seems.

According to an ABC News article on sex, researchers conducted a study at the University of Montana asking college students about their hookup experiences. The study defined “hooking up” as “a sexual encounter between two people who are not in a dating or serious relationship and do not expect anything further.”

The results weren’t surprising: 54 percent of the participants reported having casual sex throughout the school year.

While looking over the statistics, I couldn’t help but wonder: Can sex really be casual?

For me, casual is sitting around in my pajamas and watching Seinfeld. Casual is going to Chipotle for lunch with friends. Casual is, well, casual.

But sex?

I once attended a seminar taught by Marcie Calandra, an exceptionally brilliant woman with exceptionally brilliant things to say. She worked as an advanced practice nurse in woman’s health for 30 years. Now, she’s a director in nursing at Adventist Hinsdale Hospital. Needless to say, Marcie has credentials.

The topic of the seminar was sex, science and spirituality.

Marcie began with the brain and some very big numbers: 100 billion neurons and 300 billion synaptic opportunities in the neurons. That’s how powerful our brains are. These neurons are what create our memories. Every experience we have, our neurons are firing, firing, firing, and then, BAM — a memory is formed.

Sexual experiences are no different than any other neural experiences. When you have sex, you’re activating neurons that have never been activated before. The reason for this in a traditional hookup is simple: Either you’ve never had sex before, or you’ve never been with that person before.

Once the neurons have been activated, you can’t reverse the process and put them back in a non-activated state. Different experiences activate new neurons. And, in the case of sexual experiences, different people.

“Here’s the take-away,” Marcie said at this point. “The main idea: In the human sexual response, these neurons bind you forever to that human being. You can never erase that unless you have a stroke, Alzheimer’s, or a traumatic brain injury.”

And as if that concept wasn’t thought-provoking enough, Marcie hit us with another. This time, it involved spirituality.

Eyes wide, she told us about a study that was conducted on a group of nuns who claimed to see God during intense prayer and meditation. Researchers found that the part in a nun’s brain that lit up during these moments was the same part that lights up in a person’s brain during sexual climax.

Again, Marcie’s take-away: “The same place where you have your most intense experience of spirituality is the same place in the brain that is excited in the most intense moment of your sexual climax,” she said. “So having a sexual experience with someone is a pretty powerful thing.”

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one stunned by this new knowledge. The girls around the room were silent, grappling with these mind-blowing ideas.

In a world where casual sex has become the norm, Marcie showed us that there is so much more to it. But this information is not well-known, let alone talked about.

Let’s say a guy meets a girl at KAM’S. They each have a few drinks, and then decide to go back to his apartment. What are the chances that they will discuss the brain’s neuronal activity during the human sexual response?

I’d say the chances are slim to nil.

The truth is that casual sex, according to the brain, is not possible. In fact, if sex is directly tied to science and spirituality, it is anything but casual.

For us college students, it’s something to think about: Does billions of neurons rapidly firing in your brain sound casual to you?

Melanie is a freshman in Media.