To determine how much time people devoted to such thoughts, the researchers asked 283 students age 18 to 25 to use clickers (golf score counters), whenever they contemplated one of life’s three basic needs. Previous studies on the subject were overwhelming retroactively self-reported; researchers asked people after the fact to recollect how often they thought about sex, a method fraught with error.

Of course, all kinds of caveats still apply. Did they worry about clicking too often, or too infrequently, and self-adjust accordingly? What kind of thoughts were they having? Was it, “I’d really like to sleep with my boss’s new assistant” or “I wonder whether squirrels mate in the spring?”

Moreover, people lie, even to themselves, about more than just sex: Did women undercount their thoughts about food, so as not to appear anorexic on the one hand or a gourmand on the other? In what other ways did personal or societal expectations affect the participants’ accuracy?

But the study yielded some interesting insights. The number of thoughts men had about sex each day varied from as few as 1 to as many as 388. Women’s thoughts about sex were in a range of 1 to 140 times a day. These ranges make averages particularly unreliable, with the median number more informative: for men, 19 thoughts about sex daily; for women, 10. (Women thought about food and sleep less frequently as well.)