Chapter 1: What does the research say about orgasms beyond physical touch?
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Orgasms. We usually associate them solely with physical touch. But what if that's not the whole story? What if orgasms are about training your muscles, and more importantly, your brain, to somehow flip a very sexy switch? Tonight we're talking the science, pelvic floors, and whether your climax is more self-controlled than you might think. I'm here with someone who's researched this subject.
Chapter 2: How can orgasms occur without genital stimulation?
He's a behavioral neuroscientist at Charles University in Prague in Czech Republic. His name is Dr. Jim Faus. Jim, welcome to the show. Thanks, David. So your research looks at how orgasms happen and the fact that they can happen away from the private parts we usually associate them with. What exactly is going on here when this happens? For most people, this sounds like, I don't know, impossible.
I know it sounds impossible, and that's one of the reasons why we studied it. Because somebody can say, oh, I can give myself an orgasm without even touching my clitoris. And you can look at that and say, okay, is that really true?
Chapter 3: What are the objective markers of orgasm identified in the study?
And there are many ways to test whether that's true. I mean, some people would say, well, just take someone's word for it. But, you know... There are many people who say that hypnogenic orgasms probably aren't real and are a party trick, but we've tested that as well. But I got to tell you that there are objective markers of orgasm.
There are sort of hormones that flood through your system after the event happens, right?
There's hormones that flood through your system. There's also the pelvic floor movements that are very characteristic of orgasm. I think what people tend to forget is that orgasm is a sensory motor reflex, right? in the spinal cord it is, and in the brain it is.
Chapter 4: How does the brain play a role in the experience of orgasm?
And you're getting sensory input from your genitals or from other erotic zones on your body, but there is a motor component to it. And your brain tags that motor component as being very, very important.
So although we may feel the motor component of it, the pelvic floor movements that accompany orgasm, people tend to say, well, my orgasm must be clitoral or vaginal or for us, penile, because it's coming from the sensory input and they're not thinking about the motor output. But your brain has motor memory.
And that's one of the things that when you fantasize or even you do pelvic floor exercises, some people discover this with Tantra, where they're doing this pelvic floor movements, they're actually stimulating the very nerves that they would be stimulating by touching their genitals.
So what's going on in your brain, like chemically, this motor component you're talking about at the exact moment that we climax?
Well, the motor component is a memory of what, remember, memory both has its own inputs and outputs. It has its memory for what did it and a memory for how it acted when it was done. If you can think about it that way, then you can think about the fact that, you know, when you have a memory of chocolate, you sometimes swirl your tongue in your mouth.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of pelvic floor movements in achieving orgasm?
And that memory is important because the swirling your tongue in your mouth is exactly what you do when you taste chocolate. It's really weird.
You know I did that when you mentioned chocolate.
Yeah, sure, right? We all do, right? So what's so interesting about that is that if you think about orgasm that way and the fantasies are stimulating you enough and or you're moving your pelvic floor in a way that's actually stimulating the nerves, you can give yourself an orgasm. Harder for men, much easier for women.
The pelvic floor, I've always sort of associated it with, I don't know, Kegel exercises, healthy bathroom habits, I don't know, postpartum rehab. How did it sort of become the star of orgasm in this study?
Chapter 6: How does this study challenge common misconceptions about orgasms?
I didn't realize that association was there.
So I think a lot of people don't until they do. People that study tantra, there are many women who, as they're doing these breathing exercises and these pelvic floor exercises, they have an orgasm. and they can put it together and then reproduce it. And I've studied one woman like that who had the same response that we found in the study that you just read.
The woman in the study you just read had massive pelvic floor problems, She had horrible endometriosis. So she had her uterus removed, which of course creates a space in the pelvic floor because the pelvic floor is supporting that. And she basically couldn't feel anything anymore. So she had a physical therapist do exercises.
Chapter 7: What does it mean to own your orgasms according to the guest?
The exercises were Kegels, but they're like Kegels Plus, where you're not only just holding and tensing, but instead of tensing and then letting go, you're tensing and pushing. and tensing and pushing, right? And this, very much like the tantric woman that I studied, had the effect of getting her to generate orgasms.
And when she learned she could do that, you know, it's kind of like learning how to be an Olympic swimmer. Once you learn you can actually do this, she codified it. So she took what the pelvic floor teacher told her and put it into a package that she's now taught over 2,000 women how to do. So they can all do this. And of course, she came to Prague and said, okay, is it real?
I feel it's real, but is it showing the same things that you would see in somebody getting genital stimulation to orgasm?
Well, I guess that's the crux of it is feeling like an orgasm is real, the same thing as one being real, like the mind being a huge component there.
Absolutely. Right. So if it's real, then we should see two things. We should see pelvic floor movements that are consistent with it and we should see prolactin being released in the blood. So prolactin is typically inhibited. I mean, we show prolactin when we have a pituitary tumor, when we're nursing, but that's about it, or when we're horribly stressed out, but that's about it.
Orgasm is the other way. You get a huge spike in prolactin in your blood being released from the pituitary. So she did a two and a half minute orgasm and she did a 10 minute orgasm. We already knew what a five minute orgasm would look like. And Sure enough, her giving herself 10 minutes of a continuous orgasm, which actually isn't quite continuous. What it is, is it's going up.
She gets an orgasm. About eight seconds later, she gets another one. About eight seconds later, she gets another one. In that 10-minute period, her prolactin rose almost 50% above baseline, which is normal for what masturbation would do if you actually were masturbating your clitoris to orgasm.
Now, I feel like there's this cultural tendency to dismiss experiences like this as being all in people's head, being fake, being exaggerated, just because the person dismissing them doesn't have those experiences themselves. In what way does this study kind of challenge people who are skeptical like that?
Well, David, you can't fake the prolactin. I mean, I can't sit here and go, I'm going to rise my prolactin because it isn't going to go up. It's very particular things make your prolactin rise in your blood. And orgasm is one of those. And when you relate what she did in terms of her prolactin to what other people have found with masturbation and prolactin, sure enough, it's virtually identical.
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