Neuroscientist Dr. Nicole Prause grew up in Texas, where sex education served up a platter of abstinence garnished with jump-scare photos of untreated STIs. Now, she runs a basement lab where people masturbate... for science! Michelle and Nicole talk about why porn doesn't meet the scientific bar for addiction, how anxiety hijacks arousal in bed, and what her research is finding about the moments right before orgasm.
Neuroscientist Dr. Nicole Prause grew up in Texas, where sex education served up a platter of abstinence garnished with jump-scare photos of untreated STIs. Now, she runs a basement lab where people masturbate... for science! Michelle and Nicole talk about why porn doesn't meet the scientific bar for addiction, how anxiety hijacks arousal in bed, and what her research is finding about the moments right before orgasm.
Find Dr. Nicole Prause
Website: https://liberoscenter.com/
Produced by Katie Jensen of Vocal Fry Studios, now in her third season with GETSOME.
Portrait photo: Neal Preston.
Chapters
00:00 The shower question and the addiction label
03:01 Growing up with Texas sex education
04:28 Inside the sex-research lab
07:02 Masturbation and depression
09:08 What counts as addiction?
11:45 Why people use porn
13:41 When porn feels like a problem
16:50 Porn, dopamine, and human touch
18:29 When arousal feels like fear
19:50 Refractory periods and sperm health
21:50 The mystery of orgasm
23:12 Studying the brain before climax
26:44 The 3D-printed penis study
29:44 What research taught Nicole about her body
31:40 Closing and where to find Nicole
[00:00:00] Dr. Nicole Prause: They're like, "I thought about touching myself in the shower, but I didn't do it. Did I relapse?" I was like, "Oh my God, that was called a sexual urge. No, that is fine." Like, what are we doing here? Get some insight. Get some-
[00:00:27] Michelle Fischler: Michelle Fischler, certified sex therapist, and [00:00:30] this is GETSOME This season, I wanna talk about men, what they're told they should be, and what happens in bed when they can't be it. I wanna say something about the man in the shower. He's trying very hard to be good, and he has plenty of company online, men keeping streaks, counting days without porn, wondering whether a stray thought just reset the clock.
[00:00:58] Michelle Fischler: And when the streak breaks, [00:01:00] a lot of them reach the same verdict. "I must be an addict." Neuroscientist Dr. Nicole Prause would like a gentle word.
[00:01:09] Dr. Nicole Prause: I can see where the language itself, just somebody saying, "I'm doing a behavior that I feel compelled to do, and it's difficult for me to stop," if that was the only requirement for something to be an addiction, I can see where people say, "Yes, that's an addiction.
[00:01:25] Dr. Nicole Prause: Obviously, porn is addictive." And we say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There are [00:01:30] millions of behaviors that then would fit that." And if we call them all addictions, we've kind of lost any meaning of the word addiction. It just has no teeth anymore.
[00:01:41] Michelle Fischler: For some men, the reason to quit in the first place is that something stopped working in bed.
[00:01:46] Michelle Fischler: Porn looked like the obvious suspect, but Dr. Prause has another one in mind: fear. More specifically, sexual performance anxiety, which can affect up to one in four men, which [00:02:00] makes sense. Fear and arousal share a lot of the same wiring, so your body gets excited, and your brain, trying to be helpful, pulls the fire alarm instead of sitting back and enjoying the ride.
[00:02:12] Dr. Nicole Prause: When we have anxiety, some of that can be our body starting to get aroused, and we interpret it as, "Oh, no, it's gonna happen again. I'm not gonna get hard. She laughed at me last time," or, "She said, 'Do you even still love me?' last time. It's going that way again. It's gonna happen." And so [00:02:30] that accelerated breathing, heart rate, all those things that occur with arousal get interpreted as fear, anxiety, and result in a lack of arousal.
[00:02:40] Michelle Fischler: Anxiety means well. It's just misinformed. Your brain can learn to read those signals differently.
[00:02:46] Dr. Nicole Prause: Rather than saying, like, "Oh, no. Oh, no," we're saying, "Oh, yes. Oh, yes." Like, how do we get that, that flip? And it's not easy, you know? It's not just... You can't say, "Get over it," and your brain just say, "Okay, I'm over it.[00:03:00]
[00:03:00] Dr. Nicole Prause: Sounds good."
[00:03:01] Michelle Fischler: If you've ever felt guilty about how often you touch yourself, then this one's for you. Here's my conversation with Dr. Nicole Prause. What did conversations about sex sound like when you were growing up?
[00:03:18] Dr. Nicole Prause: Conversations? So I grew up in Texas, and we were at church on Sundays. I started at a conservative religious college going to church three times a week.
[00:03:29] Dr. Nicole Prause: So [00:03:30] those conversations didn't happen. They were Texas sex education, which is abstinence promoting. Uh, we saw lots of very close-up images of genitals infected with very advanced cases of syphilis. So those were our kinds of education. And so we did have some through school, but I don't remember it being a topic for discussion.
[00:03:54] Dr. Nicole Prause: So it's funny that it swung back the other way. I always joke, my dad's a pediatrician [00:04:00] who just, just retired, so he sees kids, but sometimes, we have a unique last name, people would Google my dad and come into his office and be like, "Do you do something with like some orgasm thing?" And he's like, "No, no, no.
[00:04:12] Dr. Nicole Prause: That's my daughter."
[00:04:14] Michelle Fischler: That is hilarious. So you were born in Houston, then did your undergrad and your PhD at Indiana University, co-supervised by the Kinsey Institute.
[00:04:28] Dr. Nicole Prause: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:28] Michelle Fischler: When you [00:04:30] started at Kinsey, you were still loading like VHS tapes into the machine. What did a sex lab look like back then?
[00:04:42] Dr. Nicole Prause: There is a very typical setup for any psychophysiology lab.
[00:04:46] Dr. Nicole Prause: So psychophysiology is psychology and physiology together. The main difference in our lab and other labs is usually in those labs you have a camera in the subject's room because you wanna make sure they're not falling asleep, that they're on [00:05:00] task. Hmm. And we can't do that because our subjects are partially clothed.
[00:05:04] Dr. Nicole Prause: That creates problems with when we see signal abnormalities, we usually don't know what happened. If something starts to go awry in the testing-
[00:05:13] Michelle Fischler: Yeah ...
[00:05:13] Dr. Nicole Prause: we can't catch it. So, uh, we tend to have more of those kind of challenges. But the traditional setup, which we use with the exception of the camera, is there's a subject testing room where they're in there by themself.
[00:05:25] Dr. Nicole Prause: There's a door closed between us, and depending on the [00:05:30] testing scenario, if they're masturbating or doing stimulation, we might have a more bed kind of setup with dimmer lights. More commonly, we're just getting them stimulated, so it's a brightly lit room and they've got a, you know, monitor in front of them where we're showing pornography.
[00:05:47] Dr. Nicole Prause: We're in the next room. The only thing really connecting us is a cable hole. So we have one cabling hole and then we, you know, fill it around with like egg crating to make sure we can't hear them and they can't hear us, 'cause I can't imagine like trying to [00:06:00] masturbate and you hear like click, click, click, click, click as we're typing.
[00:06:03] Dr. Nicole Prause: So we really try and think of those things to do things to make people comfortable. Like we've had spaces we moved in where there was a window in the lab previously. We're like, "Mm-mm, take it out." Yeah. It doesn't matter if we tell them we're not back there, they won't believe us. Take it out.
[00:06:17] Michelle Fischler: Totally.
[00:06:17] Dr. Nicole Prause: So we're always in the basement.
[00:06:22] Michelle Fischler: Your advisor gave you an old book about virginity as a graduation present.
[00:06:28] Dr. Nicole Prause: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:28] Michelle Fischler: What was it, [00:06:30] and what did it tell you about the way we used to write about sex?
[00:06:35] Dr. Nicole Prause: He found a old copy of Ideal Marriage, which I still have on a bookshelf right behind me actually. And it was kind of an early sex guide and talked a lot about frigidity issues and kind of how to get your woman to put out for you, and that this was appropriate, and how to maintain your man kind of thing.
[00:06:58] Dr. Nicole Prause: But written in the [00:07:00] language of the time rather than the manosphere.
[00:07:01] Michelle Fischler: Yeah, I remember you talking about how in some of these books it would talk, like w- if somebody was struggling with depression, it had said not to masturbate.
[00:07:14] Dr. Nicole Prause: Oh, that's still around. If you look at some treatments for depression, so I have a, uh, an old collaboration with somebody at University of Pittsburgh, and when I initially started talking to him about working together, like, 20 years ago, he said, "Oh my God, all of our manuals," he [00:07:30] specializes in depression treatment, "All of our manuals say tell the patients not to masturbate."
[00:07:34] Dr. Nicole Prause: And I was like, "Why?" Like what... I don't understand. He's like, "Well, it's isolating." He's like, "They're worried they're gonna sit at home and masturbate instead of, like, going out and finding a partner." And I just thought, like, if you're depressed, going out and hooking up is, like, the last thing you're gonna be able to do.
[00:07:50] Dr. Nicole Prause: You're not getting out of bed sometimes. You're barely getting out the door. That level of socializing is so advanced from where they were. And [00:08:00] so part of our conversation was the use of sexual stimulation to help interventions for general health problems, like depression. So we, in some of the data we collected, talk about those potential applications of, like, not only is it not harmful, but they may be using masturbation strategically to improve their mood at times, and that is not inherently bad.
[00:08:23] Dr. Nicole Prause: So to shame people who are already depressed and already struggling and say, "Oh, now you're... You know, you [00:08:30] have to be at home 'cause you're not good enough to have a real partner," stop. Like, it's... There's not inherently a problem with masturbation, and in fact, there's reason to think it may influence reward responsivity, for example, that's impacted in major depression.
[00:08:47] Dr. Nicole Prause: And we're still working on that. You know, don't... can't prescribe masturbation for depression right now. But, uh, but there may be a role for it, and I think it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater to just say, "Well, anything that's not [00:09:00] you, you know, trying to get laid at a bar is inferior to your depression."
[00:09:08] Michelle Fischler: You also did a research fellowship at Harvard in couples treatment for alcoholism.
[00:09:15] Dr. Nicole Prause: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:16] Michelle Fischler: What did working with alcohol addiction teach you about what people now call porn addiction?
[00:09:24] Dr. Nicole Prause: This is part of why I think some folks see me as dangerous, because I've got a [00:09:30] foot firmly in the addiction literature and a foot firmly in the sex literature, and that's very uncommon as a co-specialty.
[00:09:37] Dr. Nicole Prause: I can see where the language itself, just somebody saying, "I'm doing a behavior that I feel compelled to do and it's difficult for me to stop," if that was the only requirement for something to be an addiction, there are millions of behaviors that then would fit that. And if we call them all addictions, we've kind of lost any meaning of the word [00:10:00] addiction.
[00:10:00] Dr. Nicole Prause: It just has no teeth anymore. Porn fails in a number of ways to look like other substance addictions. Generally, if you're addicted to something, when you see it initially, your brain responds more than other people who don't struggle with that substance to it. And then later, and by later I mean, like, five seconds later not tomorrow, then they'll actually have a under-responsivity.
[00:10:27] Dr. Nicole Prause: And so I think some of the public's confusion about our data is [00:10:30] my data, electroencephalography, is a technique to measure the brain that's very fast and is faster than functional magnetic resonance imaging. MRI is much better at saying where things happen in the brain and is much slower. So when they say, "Well, these guys are saying this about porn, but you're saying that, and we believe them," I say, "Well, they're not inconsistent, actually.
[00:10:51] Dr. Nicole Prause: These are different processes." Like, we're looking at early cue activity, and they're looking at late. And so what we find is that people who [00:11:00] claim to have these addiction issues not only don't show the enhancement, they show a decreased responsivity, and that is not habituation. So then I've also seen the public say, "Well, then they're habituated.
[00:11:10] Dr. Nicole Prause: See? We've proved it." It's like, no, no, no. That's the later component. Like, the cue reactivity is a hyper-reactivity to the cues that should be there. It's been so well documented in substance addictions that some people call it, um, like a biomarker of addiction, and it is not present for pornography, and that's now been replicated by an independent German [00:11:30] laboratory.
[00:11:31] Dr. Nicole Prause: So there are other things, too, but addiction is just a very, very high bar, uh, scientifically speaking, to call something an addiction, that I think sometimes the public misses just 'cause there's, like, an overall kind of appearance of, like- Similarity.
[00:11:45] Michelle Fischler: What do you think men are getting from porn that they aren't getting anywhere else?
[00:11:51] Dr. Nicole Prause: Uh, just efficiency. It was funny. We did this study in women. I actually think this is a porn effect broadly. I don't know that it's [00:12:00] specific to men in this case. So the question is, like, why use vibrators at all? Why look at pornography? And overwhelmingly, people say they use pornography for masturbation purposes.
[00:12:12] Dr. Nicole Prause: So any study that claims to measure pornography effects, if they didn't control for masturbation, they did not study pornography. You have to account for masturbation, and most studies don't. So if you think of it that way, it's like if I'm going to masturbate and for whatever reason, it's like I'm using it to help facilitate my sleep, I want a [00:12:30] distraction 'cause something happened at work I don't wanna think about, I'm mad at my partner and they won't have sex with me and I have to go have the sex on my own.
[00:12:37] Dr. Nicole Prause: Whatever reason, there's different ways you could approach that. You could use fantasy. You could use auditory stimuli. You're gonna use some type of a stimulus. And I think what's nice about a visual stimulus like that is it's engaging enough that it makes the experience faster.
[00:12:55] Michelle Fischler: Mm-hmm.
[00:12:55] Dr. Nicole Prause: Like, you can kind of get in that mindset.
[00:12:57] Dr. Nicole Prause: It directs your attention both visual and auditory more [00:13:00] quickly. And it's not that there's a race, you know. We don't wanna get in and masturbate as fast as humanly possible. I'm sure someone is, but- ... it's not, it's not usually. But usually it's kind of like we wanna do this and get on about our business.
[00:13:13] Dr. Nicole Prause: And so I think part of why pornography is useful is people are using it for masturbation, for whatever reason they're masturbating, which is actually way more interesting to me, and, uh, they're using it to kinda get themself in that mindset more quickly and like, "Okay, let's do this." So my [00:13:30] guess is, like, if we looked, the masturbation sessions these days are probably on average much shorter than they used to be, just 'cause it makes you more efficient, Goonie accepted.
[00:13:41] Michelle Fischler: How would a man know whether his porn consumption is a problem, or whether someone else has told him it is?
[00:13:53] Dr. Nicole Prause: There's two funny studies that have this quadratic effect where men [00:14:00] who view the least pornography, like none or very little, tend to report higher sexual satisfaction. And then it- the satisfaction seems to get kind of worse and worse as they're viewing more.
[00:14:11] Dr. Nicole Prause: But then at the highest levels, they report high satisfaction again. I was like, "Okay, so it's not the porn." Like it's, it's not merely volume. And the issue you've hit on, I think, is exactly one of the major rule-outs when people have distress around their porn viewing is, [00:14:30] is this your distress, or is this in conflict?
[00:14:33] Dr. Nicole Prause: So very often it's a difference in values. You know, a partner thinks, you know, all pornography is abuse, or you only view pornography if you don't want me anymore, and our relationship now feels unstable. I feel unwanted. And those, with couples, are more likely to be the underlying issue. And instead, there's now this terrible, I think, dynamic of, "No, you're the problem.
[00:14:56] Dr. Nicole Prause: If you just stop doing this thing I don't want you to do, and let me control [00:15:00] your sexual behavior, we would be fine." I said, "Well, probably not, because what porn stands for, for you, is still not resolved." But there are cases outside of that, of course. Like, it's not just, like, your wife or whomever is upset, and then you're fine.
[00:15:15] Dr. Nicole Prause: So in the early research, there was more evidence that there were conflicts with people's moral values or upbringing. That is, it didn't matter how much porn you were viewing, but people would get upset by their use, because when [00:15:30] they were growing up, they either had religious conservative values that told them they should never masturbate or view pornography.
[00:15:36] Dr. Nicole Prause: Maybe even, you know, grew up with women that said, "You don't view porn unless you abuse women," or, "That is abuse of women." And so they say, "My God," like, "I'm abusing women when I do this. I'm a terrible person." So originally, that was thought to explain most of the identification of having a porn problem. In the last five years, there have been a few studies, one of mine included, but there's other labs as well, that see people who identify [00:16:00] as having porn problems also tend to have high narcissism.
[00:16:03] Dr. Nicole Prause: And I hate this finding, because there's so much around narcissism these days, and labeling everyone a narcissist. That is not what we're doing. What I think is happening in this case is it's an externalizing of the problem. So if you're failing at school, you're struggling at work, your relationships aren't going well, rather than saying, "What's going on with me, my dynamics, our dynamics?
[00:16:27] Dr. Nicole Prause: What am I doing or not at work?" There's still the [00:16:30] moral incongruity, moral conflict in operating in some of these folks, for sure. But in some, I think it's more this narcissistic kind of, you know, "I didn't cause any of my own problems. I didn't contribute. Someone did this to me and caused it to happen to me."
[00:16:50] Michelle Fischler: What's something about porn and the brain that would surprise the average person?
[00:16:56] Dr. Nicole Prause: These days, I think there is so much about how powerful [00:17:00] and incredible porn is that I think a lot of people would be surprised that porn doesn't spark that much dopamine. Like, that's a huge myth I see perpetuated a lot.
[00:17:11] Dr. Nicole Prause: Human touch still conquers every effect we have documented with porn. It's not quite the super powerful, overwhelming stimulus sometimes we're led to believe, I think.
[00:17:25] Michelle Fischler: And when you say touch, is the touch with [00:17:30] your own hand different from the touch you might receive from a partner?
[00:17:36] Dr. Nicole Prause: Yes. There are a few things, but kind of the two main things that separate those are, one, kind of physiological.
[00:17:43] Dr. Nicole Prause: That is when you're touched on hairy skin by another human hand that is not covered by a glove, there's very specific activation that tell us, like, we are being touched by another person. That doesn't happen when we masturbate, and that doesn't happen when we view pornography. [00:18:00] The other thing I like to point out is kind of the psychological difference.
[00:18:03] Dr. Nicole Prause: That is both men and women, when they're asked one of the main predictors of sexual satisfaction, is feeling desired by the other person. And when there's no other person there, it's hard to maybe remember, uh, that we are feeling desired by someone else. So I think there are both kind of psychological and physiological bases for a difference between masturbation and touch by a partner.
[00:18:29] Michelle Fischler: Let's get [00:18:30] into a bit of neurobiology now. How much do the brain's arousal and fear systems overlap? And what does that mean for a man that gets anxious in bed?
[00:18:46] Dr. Nicole Prause: They're heavily overlapping, which is interesting. Sometimes we talk in neuroscience trying to understand these effects, like why are people into BDSM that seems to have, like, real pain associated [00:19:00] with it when it's outside of the sexual context, and we think this is essentially just a cognitive flip.
[00:19:06] Dr. Nicole Prause: It's an interpretation where, you know, if something happens to my body, I can say, "That hurt me," or I can say, "That felt good." And within limits, we're able to redirect that interpretation to say that this thing was pleasurable or activating. So when we have anxiety, some of that can be our body starting to get aroused, and we interpret it as, "Oh, no, it's gonna happen [00:19:30] again.
[00:19:30] Dr. Nicole Prause: I'm not gonna get hard. She laughed at me last time," or, "She said, 'Do you even still love me?' last time. It's going that way again. It's gonna happen." And so that accelerated breathing, heart rate, all those things that occur with arousal get interpreted as fear, anxiety, and anticipating failure.
[00:19:50] Michelle Fischler: What decides how long a man needs after he comes before he can get hard again?
[00:19:57] Dr. Nicole Prause: Oh, God, if I knew this answer. [00:20:00]
[00:20:00] Michelle Fischler: Oh,
[00:20:01] Dr. Nicole Prause: yeah. Yeah. So there's quite a lot of- Data on refractory periods in animal models, but those probably don't map on super well to men. We have a lot of data in the reproductive literature about how long you need to wait between ejaculations to optimize for spermatic health generally, like motility factors.
[00:20:25] Dr. Nicole Prause: There was a super interesting paper last year, actually. Um, so we used to advise people [00:20:30] if you're trying to provide a sample to get your partner pregnant or to test your sperm, that you wanted to wait a week, and turns out there was actually not any data really behind that. So they started looking, like, well, how long do you need to wait?
[00:20:43] Dr. Nicole Prause: And found out actually, like, if you wait a longer period and don't have, uh, nocturnal emissions either, so this is any ejaculation, that you actually have a higher rate of DNA damage in the sperm. So there is some argument. We used to say, like, [00:21:00] regular masturbation or ejaculation might be useful for prostate cancer prevention.
[00:21:05] Dr. Nicole Prause: It now looks like it also is probably useful for maintaining sperm health. If you're trying to get pregnant, don't probably go for three months without any kind of ejaculation. And in general, if you don't ejaculate for a while, the body often will take care of it for you. You'll have a nocturnal emission, and the likelihood of those goes up as your orgasm rate, uh, while you're awake goes down.
[00:21:26] Dr. Nicole Prause: But there, there are now at least two reasonable [00:21:30] reasons to probably have regular ejaculations. And within that literature, it, we have seen that it's probably fine within 24 hours to expect, like, the sperm factors to be more or less returned to baseline. So really, just wait a day or two, and you can probably do another sample.
[00:21:50] Michelle Fischler: What's a mystery we're still trying to figure out when it comes to the neurobiology of sexual health?
[00:21:58] Dr. Nicole Prause: Orgasm trigger [00:22:00] That one for sure. What I wanna understand is how we get the transition from sexual arousal to starting to approach climax. That's where we're really focused in the lab right now, and I think those are really differentiable brain responses.
[00:22:15] Dr. Nicole Prause: And we probably can understand why people have differences. Like, some people can get aroused just fine, but can't seem to get over the hump, right? They can't climax. They don't know why. Some people have the opposite. They're like, "Look, if I can get aroused, I can get an [00:22:30] orgasm, but it's like, it's really hard for me to get in that mindset."
[00:22:33] Dr. Nicole Prause: And so if we understand the differences in those brain phases, which I think they are different, we should be able to understand why we have those disconnects. It's like, yes, they often co-occur, but they often are individual, like only one or the other. And why is that? Like and, uh, if these really are just a matter of, like, getting a stronger vibrator, then it shouldn't matter.
[00:22:55] Dr. Nicole Prause: You know? We should just be able to get everyone on a Sybian and their anorgasmia [00:23:00] problem would go away, and obviously that's not the case.
[00:23:02] Michelle Fischler: A Sybian, by the way, is this vibrator that is- Like, really powerful.
[00:23:11] Dr. Nicole Prause: Yes.
[00:23:12] Michelle Fischler: The really cool part about the research you're working on now is you're starting to notice differences that we had never seen before.
[00:23:22] Michelle Fischler: Is it, like, your alpha... Wait, you explain it.
[00:23:25] Dr. Nicole Prause: Yeah. We're trying to figure this out right now. So there are, [00:23:30] like, three labs in the world that study orgasm, and one of them recently stopped. So usually they would put people in the situation to have a climax, and there was no separation in these studies of starting to get aroused versus trying to actually climax.
[00:23:48] Dr. Nicole Prause: So obviously, like, I think obviously, the second we start stimulation, we're not like, "Now, go for it. Orgasm immediately." Like, no, you're enjoying the ride. Like this is [00:24:00] part of the enjoyment of sex for a lot of people, is, uh, enjoying the pleasure leading up to that experience. And so we said in our protocol we wanted to separate these phases.
[00:24:12] Dr. Nicole Prause: So we have people doing stimulation where we tell them, like, "We don't want you to climax yet." And we didn't really expect to see qualitative differences. We thought it'd be quantitative. Like, the slope would get more steep as people, like, put in more effort, you know uh, [00:24:30] leading up to it.
[00:24:30] Michelle Fischler: Yeah.
[00:24:31] Dr. Nicole Prause: Instead, we found qualitative differences.
[00:24:34] Dr. Nicole Prause: So we had people doing stimulation initially. We'd see really strong suppression of the alpha response in the brainwaves, which broadly alpha could be thought of as a cortical idling state. So I always say, like, if you're watching TV and you kind of space out and you, like, suddenly realize you don't remember what just happened in the story the last two minutes, your alpha was probably quite high.
[00:24:53] Dr. Nicole Prause: You're awake, you are interacting with the environment, but you're not super engaged. So early phase arousal, we have strong [00:25:00] suppression of alpha because it is effortful engagement. I'm trying to get aroused. When we tell people to try to climax, it turns, and the alpha starts to float up. And we said, "The hell is that?"
[00:25:13] Dr. Nicole Prause: So we said, well, maybe, maybe that's special. Like, maybe there really has to be a precondition for climax to occur, and w- we don't really know what's happening in the brain at climax because there's a lot of movement. Our best guess right now is that orgasm is probably [00:25:30] a lot of synchronous firing that's similar to seizures.
[00:25:33] Dr. Nicole Prause: And if you think of it that way, then in a orgasmic state, just like in a seizure, you're not really able to monitor your environment. You're not gonna respond to things going on around you in the room. It's a reflex. Like, once it's triggered, it's gonna continue to its termination. So we think what might be happening is because orgasm is kind of this state where you can't be responsive, is leading up to it, you have to have some level, [00:26:00] some minimal level of activation, heart rate engagement, all this, but then you have to release the control to allow the brain to go into that state That's best guess
[00:26:08] Michelle Fischler: Which actually makes quite a lot of sense, so that it doesn't activate right away for people.
[00:26:16] Michelle Fischler: Otherwise, we'd be completely at risk. I mean, going back, back, back in evolution, right? Like We can't just, you know, have an orgasm when there's a lion [00:26:30] behind the bush. Mm-hmm.
[00:26:31] Dr. Nicole Prause: I know. I was like, I'm not personally, like, much of an evolutionary person- Yeah ... but I was like, "Oh, the evos are gonna love me."
[00:26:44] Michelle Fischler: You once 3D-printed penises to find out what size women actually prefer. Whose idea was that? And did you keep any after the study?
[00:26:59] Dr. Nicole Prause: They are [00:27:00] still all here, and I don't know what to do with them. I keep trying to find someone to take them. So I collaborated with an evolutionary psychologist, Geoffrey Miller, and I was mainly interested in pain issues.
[00:27:13] Dr. Nicole Prause: That's dyspareunia, that usually women are more likely to experience during sex, and I was like, "We should test the relevance of size for pain." But we had seen all these studies where they had, like, asked people to estimate, like, what size is best for you? And I was like, how do [00:27:30] you... Like, we have tons of data showing people are really bad at estimating size, and why would we take anyone's word for it?
[00:27:37] Dr. Nicole Prause: Male, female, it doesn't matter, like, people are just bad at this. So we said we need a better model, something haptic or physical, and 3D printing was becoming pretty accessible at the time, and I needed some other stuff for my lab. We design a lot of our own hardware anyway, and I was at UCLA and found there were some 3D printers on campus.
[00:27:59] Dr. Nicole Prause: I [00:28:00] said, "I think we got this." Like, let's go here. So we used those models to make more concrete estimates than people just trying to recall and then also be accurate about their sizing estimates, which is just something most people are not good at doing.
[00:28:17] Michelle Fischler: Was there a difference in what people chose in terms of size for the long-term partner versus, like, more of a one-time experience?[00:28:30]
[00:28:30] Dr. Nicole Prause: Yes, I did not know at the time we did the study that there is a term for this called husband dick. Pardon my language. So the women had a slight preference for larger phalluses when they were thinking of who they would like to have one-time sex with versus a long-term partnership. This was not what we kind of originally intended to publish with those data.
[00:28:54] Dr. Nicole Prause: We were looking at pain issues, but it ended up just blowing [00:29:00] up. It ended up on, like, late night talk shows 'cause they're like, "Oh, that's handy. Then I can just put on my other penis when I'm ready to settle down." So yeah, it ended up being really widely cited and is not something I really do a lot of work on typically, but it was a fun project.
[00:29:14] Dr. Nicole Prause: And I think, you know, we really took pains to try and do it very accurately and, like, validate the models after we had them printed to make sure they were what we said they were, and to be clear. Like, we made them blue, which caused a lot of Smurf jokes, but the reason [00:29:30] they were blue is to make sure they didn't refer to a particular ethnicity, you know, or cause people to, to think that in their responses.
[00:29:37] Michelle Fischler: Yeah.
[00:29:37] Dr. Nicole Prause: So we really did take pains to try and be as accurate as we could be about a somewhat humorous, inherently, topic.
[00:29:44] Michelle Fischler: How do you think that the work that you've done has changed the way that you think about your own body?
[00:29:52] Dr. Nicole Prause: We were doing the early testing. I remember I came out of the testing space one time afterwards, and my colleague was like, "Do you [00:30:00] have any idea how consistent you are?"
[00:30:02] Dr. Nicole Prause: And I was like, "What? What do you mean?" And he's like, "You were literally, like, within 10 seconds, uh, from onset to the end every single time." I was like, "No way." 'Cause it feels like you're just doing your thing, and it is what it is that time, that day. And it turns out the body is actually kind of machine-like in that sense.
[00:30:22] Dr. Nicole Prause: Like, you can potentially have-
[00:30:24] Michelle Fischler: Yeah ...
[00:30:24] Dr. Nicole Prause: for whatever it is for your body, like, a very well-characterized [00:30:30] approach to climax. But even in the experience, like, it didn't feel like that. And so, uh, I was like, "That's insane. Like, how..." And he was right. I mean, he's like, "The data are right there." I can't dispute that.
[00:30:44] Dr. Nicole Prause: There are all these companies now that are offering these devices to help you monitor yourself sexually, and I hate and love them. Like, I hate the idea that you're gonna monitor every time. I hope people don't do that. But using those to help understand, like, something [00:31:00] about your body or, like, oh, I see now where this is happening, and this is, if I'm trying to climax, I gotta stop doing this and start doing that.
[00:31:09] Dr. Nicole Prause: That's gonna help me get there.
[00:31:10] Michelle Fischler: Yes.
[00:31:11] Dr. Nicole Prause: When we have people into the lab for the study we're running now, I try to offer to show guys if I'm able to run things quickly. I was like, "Do you wanna see your readings?" You know? And 99 times out of 100, they're like, "Hell yes, I wanna see." Like... And, and obviously it's like, I get it, like, there's no other place they're gonna ever learn something like this, [00:31:30] and it's not that it necessarily rocks their world or, like, changes everything.
[00:31:33] Dr. Nicole Prause: But it's like, oh, that's why that feels that way. Like, there's some power in that knowledge, I think.
[00:31:40] Michelle Fischler: Dr. Prause, thank you so much for being here and just having this opportunity to speak to you one-on-one. I thought you were a badass before. But you are, like, capital B badass.
[00:31:57] Dr. Nicole Prause: I love it. I appreciate you helping spread some of this [00:32:00] stuff, 'cause we are a tiny field, so it's hard sometimes to get the info out.
[00:32:04] Michelle Fischler: I got your back. Where can people find you and your work?
[00:32:08] Dr. Nicole Prause: I always have liberoscenter.com, so L-I-B-E-R-O-S center.com. I should always be on ResearchGate. That's where academics hang out and pass out our papers, and I'm happy to pass you my paper if anyone wants to make a request there.
[00:32:25] Michelle Fischler: If you have a story that you wanna tell on GET SOME, email me at [00:32:30] michelle@getsome.ca.
[00:32:33] Michelle Fischler: Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at getsome_podcast. You'll get insights on sex and sexuality, dating tips, and behind-the-scenes content between episodes. This show is produced by Katie Jensen at Vocal Fry Studios. Thanks for listening. See you
later.