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“It's difficult to get funding for it. It's a sensitive topic socially.”
The French call it “la petite mort,” or the little death. But for a handful of scientists seeking to understand the science of human sexual climax, a better term for the orgasm might be the big riddle. We know muscles contract, blood surges, hormones flow. We know which nerves fire, and which parts of the brain light up at the moment of peak physical pleasure. Still, as Dr. Barry Komisaruk, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University, Newark, says, “we don’t have a clue why orgasms feel so good.”
Winks and nudges aside, answering that question may lead to a very practical medical application. In 1983, Komisaruk and his colleagues found that vaginal stimulation in women causes the pelvic nerve to release into the spinal cord a particular peptide fragment with analgesic properties. Subsequent study found that as a pain blocker, this peptide fragment is seven times stronger than morphine. Komisaruk says that a few biotech firms have approached him about marketing the peptide as a pain relief drug. However, no deals have been signed as he looks for the right commercial partner.
Komisaruk, senior author of a 2006 book called The Science of Orgasm, holds a patent on the peptide fragment. He discovered the chemical after noticing that laboratory animals felt less pain for up to an hour following vaginal stimulation. Considering that the male rat requires eight separate penile insertions to successfully impregnate a female, Komisaruk hypothesizes an evolutionary benefit to the analgesia: “Less pain means less stress during mating,” he says.
For Komisaruk, the big scientific question underlying the orgasm is not evolutionary, it’s metaphysical: “How do chemicals moving around in a saline bath produce this effect of profound pleasure? To understand an orgasm is to understand conscious awareness.”
Because the orgasm is a poorly understood interaction of endocrinology, neuroscience, and psychology, one would imagine that it would be a subject of widespread investigation. But Komisaruk finds that beyond himself and his two co-authors on The Science of Orgasm, an endocrinologist and a sexuality researcher, there aren’t many teams in the United States exploring the orgasm. “It’s difficult to get funding for it,” Komisaruk says. “It’s a sensitive topic socially.”
Not so in the famously open-minded Netherlands. For several years at the University of Groningen, Professor Gert Holstege has been looking at the orgasmic brain through a PET scanner. In 2005, he made headlines by announcing that the part of women’s brains that governs emotions “goes dead” during orgasm. Holstege has speculated that, similar to the analgesia Komisaruk discovered, the shutting down of the emotional brain in women during orgasm is a defensive reflex against pain and fear.
The chemical flood that accompanies an orgasm stimulates the same neurons in the forebrain that respond to addictive substances like heroin and alcohol. An orgasm produces higher levels of oxytocin, a hormone that scientists have shown increases trust between people, and even sparks generosity. It’s no wonder that religious scholars from medieval Cabalists to ancient Hindus regarded the orgasm as union with the divine.
Back at Rutgers, Komisaruk is now experimenting with an MRI scanner as a biofeedback tool for women with chronic pain. The idea is to let women see their brain activity when they have stimulated the pelvic nerve to the point that Komisurak’s analgesic peptide fragment enters the spinal cord and blocks pain. Once they know what to do, they can do it at home instead of popping a pill. “If we can identify the regions [of the brain] that are actively activated by orgasm, we have the potential to counteract pathologies such as depression and addiction,” Komisaruk says.
