http://www.nj.com/insidejersey/index.ssf/2010/04/science_consciousness_and_the.htmlBarry Komisaruk studies the female orgasm. But not in the way most men do, between the sheets. His research is done in a laboratory.
The Rutgers neuroscientist analyzes brains in their most enthusiastic state, hoping to strengthen women’s orgasms and aid the climax-challenged.
“We want to find ways to increase pleasure in people’s lives,” he says.
To do this, Komisaruk selects volunteers to self-stimulate inside an fMRI machine so he and his team can study which areas of the brain — the body’s sexiest organ — are activated by arousal.
And this is why I’m here. Today I will donate an orgasm to science.
Dr. Barry Komisaruk, a Rutgers' based neuroscientist, works with Pat Singh, MRI technologist, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, as they look at the brain scan of a 31 year old female volunteer while she masturbates in an fMRI machine at the lab in Newark. The purpose of the experiment is to analyze where the stimulation activates the brain.Patti Sapone/ The Star Ledger
While the 68-year-old Komisaruk has been witness to more than 200 live-action orgasms in his lab, he’s too busy nerding out on stuff such as surging hormones, bonding peptides and synapsing neurons (when amplified, he says they sound like popcorn popping) to view the process in any way other than clinically.
Though he does maintain a sense of humor about his research. “I got into vaginal stimulation about 25 years ago,” he says. “That is, professionally speaking.”
Among the things Komisaruk has discovered so far is that orgasm is a natural pain-blocker, lessening it by up to 50 percent.
Orgasm also maintains or heightens a woman’s sensitivity to touch, making a lover’s caresses all the sweeter. (The business-savvy Komisaruk already has taken out a patent on the peptide that creates this response.)
But plenty of mysteries remain. The comprehension of this bodily function is still in its infancy. Despite our ability to plow through the atmosphere and land on the moon, we have yet to figure out the reasons behind what makes our own bodies undulate.
Some contend it’s just evolutionary leftovers from the man’s ejaculatory climax. Others, such as Komisaruk, believe there’s a purpose to a woman’s flush-faced ecstasy — but he’s not quite sure what it is yet. It could be that the contractions of the uterus during orgasm help draw semen into the Fallopian tubes to aid pregnancy, that the pleasure tempts the woman to copulate repeatedly, or that orgasm allows a healthy release of muscle tension from the body.
On the day I donate my orgasm, I bring along my hot pink dildo. But as I enter the sterile lab, I wish I had chosen something subtler. Komisaruk and his four associates, all in white lab coats, greet me. As they hand me my very unsexy pale blue gown to change into, I have second thoughts — “How am I going to orgasm with five scientists watching me?” — but decide to push myself.
Science needs my climax!
The first thing I am asked to do is give a urine sample.
This is for a pregnancy test: There must be no fetus endangerment under the fMRI’s three teslas of magnetic strength.
Then my dildo must be checked for metals — anything magnetic will fly toward the machine. I try to remain calm as a vision of dangerous flying dildos passes through my mind.
The scientists load me into the machine and put a sheet over me, preserving my modesty.
Next step: They strap my head down, because any movement distorts the brain imaging. Ever try to have an orgasm without facial contortions?
I feel as if I’m being shoved into the middle of a toilet paper roll, the walls so close my eyelashes almost graze them.
Then I hear a voice through the earphones I’m wearing. It’s Komisaruk.
“You okay in there?” he asks.
Graduate student Nan Wise, 52, puts a dollop of lube on my hand before running around to join the other scientists in the control room.
Born and raised in Jersey City, Wise now lives in West Orange and works closely with Komisaruk. She began her career as a therapist because she was interested in what makes people tick and wanted to help them “regulate their emotions.”
With the invention of the fMRI only 20 years ago, along came the ability to look at brain activity. She says that by understanding a function as gigantic as the orgasm, a response that hijacks all of one’s attention, she might also learn how smaller emotions affect behavior and decision making.
“The more we understand how the brain works,” she says, “the more we will be able to help people modulate its activity.”
Wise once volunteered to donate her orgasm. During the experiment, she lost her grasp and her purple dildo went flying. It remains a popular subject during many grad-student happy hours.
“It was the worst orgasm I ever had,” she says.
As the machine switches on, it sounds like a jackhammer. I follow Komisaruk’s instructions and as I do, the group watches my brain on their computer monitors.
Komisaruk, who lives in Maplewood, is the co-author of “The Science of Orgasm” and “The Orgasm Answer Guide” (both of the Johns Hopkins University Press). He never expected his interest in science to lead to a career researching women’s sexual responses.
He grew up in Brooklyn and went on to attend City College of New York. From there, he got a doctoral degree from Rutgers, did a post-doc at UCLA and then returned to Rutgers to join the faculty. He’s been at the New Brunswick campus since 1966, and now is also associate dean of the graduate school.
From the beginning, one question shaped his research: How do neurons produce awareness? When he was just starting out, he met with scientists, many of whom became mentors, and participated in their projects. He cut his teeth manipulating the hormones of doves and rabbits. Working with the celebrated psychologist B. F. Skinner, endocrinologist C. H. Sawyer and psychologist James Olds, he even inserted rods into rats’ genitals to study the rodents’ pseudo-pregnancy response.
He discovered that during vaginal stimulation, the rats looked somewhat paralyzed. They wouldn’t respond to sensory input. Through trial and error with the rats, Komisaruk found vaginal stimulation was causing not paralysis, but a painblocking response.
Around this time, Komisaruk’s wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was often in a lot of discomfort or extreme pain. She died in 1982 at just 40 years old, and her experience affected her husband’s career path. Having watched her suffer, Komisaruk decided to apply his research with animals to humans.
“I felt like a dummy standing there helplessly watching my wife in terrible, unrelenting pain,” he says. “I felt I should use what I was taught as a scientist to do something that would be directly useful to people, and there is a real need to control people’s pain.”
The volunteer raises her hand to indicate that she is having an orgasim. Dr. Barry Komisaruk, a Rutgers' based neuroscientist and his team do a brain scan of a 31 year old female volunteer while she masturbates in an MRI machine at the lab in Newark. The purpose of the experiment is to analyze where the stimulation activates the brain. Patti Sapone/ The Star Ledger
Komisaruk was able to reconfigure a lot of the experiments he did on female rats to women. He found many similarities, even the pain-blocking peptide that is released during vaginal stimulation. As most answers in research lead to more questions, so did this.
These days, Komisaruk is trying to learn how to augment pleasure, which goes hand in hand with lessening pain.
Research and teaching take up most of his time, but when he has a spare moment, he visits with his two adult sons. He says they have always supported his interests. “They’re never embarrassed, at least not to my face.”
During my first hour in the fMRI machine, researchers map my genitals to find out which parts — cervix, uterus, clitoris — correlate to which regions of the brain. A similar map, called the cortical homunculus, was published for the male body in 1951. The one Komisaruk is working on will be the first of its kind for women. (Wise calls it the “hermunculus.”)
Finally, it’s time for the climax. And thank goodness, because I’m getting sleepy touching myself to the rhythm of the machine’s droning.
“You have 10 minutes,” Komisaruk says through my earphones. “Stimulate to orgasm."
I’m told to signal orgasm by raising my left hand.
The goal-oriented part of myself overwhelms my embarrassment. On the other side of the glass pane, the scientists can see my brain getting happy. Regions light up as sensation begins building. They are watching my brain on orgasm — brain porn.
“The brain becomes very active as someone approaches orgasm,” Komisaruk explains. He, Wise and the other research associates have found that four different pairs of nerves — hypogastric, vagus, pudendal and pelvic — carry information from the woman’s genital area via the spinal cord to her brain.
As this information registers in the brain, chemical messengers start doing their work.
Dopamine and oxytocin are let loose — the dopamine stimulates the pleasure sensations as oxytocin, which is released throughout the bloodstream, initiates the uterine contractions that often accompany orgasm.
A woman also experiences accelerated heartbeat, blood pressure, flushness, pupil dilation and sweating — orgasm is a full-body workout. Because there are so many pathways for sensation, Komisaruk believes a woman has the capacity to experience a more intense and complex orgasm than a man.
Wise, who also is a relationship psychotherapist, says it’s worth knowing your nerves. “To know how to play your instrument,” she says, “you have to learn your range.”
Komisaruk proudly discusses what his research — and knowing another’s range — has done for his own sex life. “I understand better how to elicit sexual pleasure in a woman,” he says, “and it seems to work. It’s a validation of my own research.”
Some women can create the sensation of orgasm from thought alone, without touch. In slang, the phenomenon is called “thinking off.” Komisaruk and Wise have studied these women with extreme interest.
“Our mind is much more powerful than we imagine,” says Wise. “If we can become aroused by thoughts, why not orgasm from them?”
Traci, a 30-year-old woman who has given an orgasm to Komisaruk’s fMRI, discovered her ability to “think off ” while chatting online. “It just kind of happened,” she says, “I don’t know how it happened. I think I’m just really horny.”
Though she has harnessed a skill many women would pay big money for, she rarely will just pop one out while she’s out and about. “I haven’t really done it much,” she says, “but you know what? I probably should.”
When she went through the fMRI, she brought herself to orgasm using her special skill — without touching herself.
“If it could somehow help people who’ve never had an orgasm before, that’d be cool,” she says.
Komisaruk is not sure if women such as Traci are tricking their brains into thinking there is real sensory input — or, if the ability is actually a shortcut to an “orgasm center” of the brain.
“If we can understand their process,” says Komisaruk, “we might be able to teach these techniques to women who have trouble with orgasm.”
One of Komisaruk’s ideas for a therapeutic practice is to put people who are having trouble with orgasm into the fMRI and do neurobiofeedback, meaning they will see their own brains in close to real time and have the chance to try to manipulate the regions of their brains that are activated — and hopefully, in this way, learn to achieve orgasm.
At about the five-minute mark through my own path to orgasm in the lab, I’m worried I’m going to let everyone down. They had paid me a $100 subject fee, and I wanted to give them their money’s worth.
After all, it’s not easy to get funding for this stuff — Komisaruk says he spends at least half of his time applying for grants. Once, he had to agree to take out the word “vaginal” from the title of one of his studies before a foundation would release funds already allocated to him.
“There’s no premium on studying pleasure in this society,” he tells me as Wise murmurs, “What do you expect? We were founded by Puritans.”
So I am really glad — not to mention pleased, sensationally — when I start to feel those familiar contractions. I raise my left hand in the nick of time and break into a smile inside my little toilet paper roll.
Komisaruk and Wise run into the room and high-five me.
It’s strange at first, but then I start to think that all orgasms should end that way. They can’t stop talking about my brain: “Your brain — it’s such a good brain!”
I regain my embarrassment and hide my dildo under the sheet. The scientists will first store all my data, then convert it and analyze it.
The data takes two hours to convert, but it can take much longer to make sense of it.
“We’ll be at this for a while,” Komisaruk says.
One of the biggest conundrums of the orgasm turns out to be a nagging question for all mankind: The orgasm activates the same part of the brain — the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula — as pain.
Komisaruk gives me a visual example, showing me images of people making O-faces. Their faces are tweaked completely sideways with mangled mouths and eyes shut tight. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d told me they all had just had their feet run over by a semi truck.
“What is the difference between pleasure and pain?” Komisaruk asks. “What makes something feel good?” He begins slipping more and more into his thoughts. “Neurons, little bags of chemicals, create awareness,” he says, “but how? How does the brain create the mind?”
I see that at the heart of all his orgasmic research, there is a philosopher trying not only to augment pleasure, but also figure out the nuts and bolts that make up the human experience.
“It’s the hard question I want to answer,” he says. “What creates consciousness?
“I find that,” he adds, “and I find the Nobel Prize.”
