How many nerve endings are in the average human clitoris? 8,000 is a number often bandied about by various media sources, but we must surely have a more accurate count than that.
Clitoris are found in a variety of non-human animals, including snakes, ratites like ostriches, lemurs, fossa and moles. And thanks to research just presented at the 23rd Annual Fall Scientific Meeting of the Sexual Medicine Society of North America, we now have the most accurate count to date of the number of nerve fibres present in the human clitoris.
Researchers studied clitoral tissue obtained from 7 transmasculine patients undergoing gender-affirming phalloplasty surgery. The mean number of myelinated nerve fibres innervating the clitoris was 10,281, ranging from 9,852 to 11,086.
This iceberg-like organ is even more sensitive than we realized. It shows how many of the figures we take as facts are based on less-than-ideal science and how many things we still can learn from studying basic science, like anatomy.
