11: Nicole Prause

Welcome to Episode 11, where NICOLE PRAUSE and I discuss, among other things, the scientific study of orgasm, the pernicious effects of social discomfort about sex on those trying to study it, and her journey from sleepy little Beaumont, Texas to sparkly, cutting-edge Los Angeles. Life hasn’t always been easy for Nikky, but that’s just made her scrappy—a determined problem solver. Nikky Prause is an expert psychophysiologist and neuroscientist. She trained among other places at the KINSEY INSTITUTE for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, at Indiana University in Bloomington. She’s an associate research scientist at UCLA and a licensed clinical psychologist. Recently, she founded LIBEROS, LLC, which is her very own private research institute and biotech company. I don’t have a Nicole Prause book to link to here, but I do have things for you to check out if you’re interested in learning more (see links below). And I do want to say this: Nicole Prause is doing vitally important work—work that for all kinds of bad reasons has been made unreasonably difficult for her to do. She has been subject to threats, lies, attempts to derail her career…it goes on and on. So she has fashioned an unorthodox approach that seeks to overcome the various and relentless impediments she’s had to face. This makes me think at least two things: 1) She really is going to win these battles. Don’t let her good humor and warmth deceive you—she’s a real fighter. 2) We owe Nikky a tremendous debt of gratitude. She’s fighting to do her work, yes, but when the ultimate accounting is done—when we realize the fruits of her labor—we’ll realize that WE are the real beneficiaries. So thanks Nikky. Keep up the fight. We’re standing with you. And here are those links I promised! Check them out: Nicole Prause in the Secret Life of Scientists and EngineersStudying Sexual Rewards: It May Not Be Orgasm: TEDx Boulder * * * As always, remember that this podcast is brought to you by VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship. Plus, we're a member of the TEEJ.FM podcast network. AND... The music of CIRCLE OF WILLIS was composed and performed by Tom Stauffer, Gene Ruley and their band THE NEW DRAKES. You can purchase this music at their Amazon page.

• TRANSCRIPT

  Jim Coan

  From VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship, this is episode 11 of Circle of Willis, where I chat with psychophysiologist and neuroscientist Nicole Prause about the rewards and challenges of using science to study sex.

  Jim Coan

  Hey everyone, it's Jim Coan and this is my podcast Circle of Willis... Or at least it was my podcast. We'll see how long it lasts after this episode is released into the wild. This might be it folks. I might be crossing some kind of line here. I don't know. Probably not. But the thing is, in this episode, I'm talking with Nicole Prause, whose friends call her Nikki, about the science of sex. You know what? Sex comes up, a lot. Nikki Prause is an expert psychophysiologist and neuroscientist. She trained, among other places, at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University. She's an associate research scientist at UCLA and a licensed clinical psychologist. And recently, she founded Liberos, LLC, which is her very own private research institute and biotech company. There's a lot of complex reasons for that we're going to talk about. But anyway, we're all mature adults, right? We've all had sex ed. Well, many of us have. But the thing is, we still have a pretty hard time talking about sex, you know, as a community, as a culture, as a society. And you might think that scientists, you know, who, at the very least, can make the topic kind of clinical and sterile with all their jargon would be especially above it all. That there wouldn't be anything particularly controversial about applying the scientific method to what is, after all, a huge aspect of human behavior and physiology: our sexual responses. And well, if you thought that you'd be kind of wrong. Sex just makes people feel uncomfortable. Seems like whenever it comes up, there's always some kind of unspoken or compulsory acknowledgement that all involved in the conversation may have at times, actually done it. Sex, I mean. They may have engaged in sex. And that's pretty private stuff. I don't like to talk about that, if I don't have to. And so we avoid it. Or at the extreme, we sort of silence it. Not only avoiding it ourselves, but also demanding that others avoid it too. Weird thing is, I kind of understand that. So for example, in you know, in the family I grew up in, there were certain words that one simply did not say. And I'm not talking about the F bomb here. I'm talking about the words, penis and vagina. Those were words, you know... But anyway, look, I've come a long way. I'm pretty confident, for example, that my daughters don't regard those words, penis and vagina, as either mysterious or controversial. It's taken some effort, I won't lie, but I have committed to helping them grow up in a world where simply speaking the words penis and vagina is no cause for alarm. And it's been a challenge, at times. It's been, like I said, it's been an effort. It's taken effort. Like when my daughter Lulu, decided to educate everyone in the grocery checkout line about the fact that her daddy had a penis. That was hard for me. I mean, in the abstract, it's not really a problem, right? It's not controversial. Most of the people in that line, I would say the overwhelming majority even would probably have correctly guessed that I have a penis. But at the same time it's my preference to refrain from reminding people of that fact. At least while waiting in line to purchase my milk and eggs and brussel sprouts or whatever. It's just it isn't apropos, the situation. Point is people, it isn't easy for me to talk about genitals. Really under any circumstances. That's really what I wanted to say. I'm not proud of that, or even happy about it, but it is, as they say, what it is. In all seriousness, folks, the sex researchers face a lot of challenges and Nikki's case, those challenges have even left her fearing for her personal safety. She has been harassed for years by various individuals and groups with anti sex axes to grind. And she's kept at it anyway, because of a genuine passion for the work and a conviction that real scientific knowledge about sex and sexuality is good for everyone. So, take a little time to get to know her here, by listening to our conversation, which starts right now.

  Jim Coan

  This is gonna be tough. It's gonna be tough because I'm going to- Will it offend you if I giggle constantly?

  Nicole Prause

  I will be giggling constantly.

  Jim Coan

  I mean, you know, one of the things when- I, you know, I teach abnormal psychology. And I have to talk at some point and this is even the way I say it, I have to talk about sexual dysfunction. And it freaks me out because it freaks them out. Right? And I'm sort of empathic to a fault sometimes. So I'm looking at these poor nervous undergraduates that are just like ugh. But I've sort of found that the way to deal with it is to go just all in. So I open up with a slide from this old radio show called Love Lines. Do you know what Love Lines?

  Nicole Prause

  With Drew?

  Jim Coan

  Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  He's still on. I got asked to be on a show with him two days ago, possibly.

  Jim Coan

  So somebody compiled a bunch of questions that were asked that were sent in there. And some of them are pretty, you know, like, you know, they're pretty risque. And so they giggle for five minutes or something. And then they get over it. So yeah, that's sort of what we're in for talking with Nikki Prause. When did we first meet? Did we first meet at SPR? I was trying to remember that when I was flying out here. It was like a panel. I was on a panel. I remember you raised your hand.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, I'm the annoying person who every time you were on a reward panel is like what about sex? What about sex? You were like, shut up back there.

  Jim Coan

  I remember that cuz I was sitting next to Eddie Harmon Jones whos a character.

  Nicole Prause

  Indeed.

  Jim Coan

  And, yeah, I remember deferring to him. When you raised it. Have you thought about this approach? I think was because we were talking about approaching withdrawal. And we were talking about the approach motivation stuff.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. They're having trouble using desert stimuli with...

  Jim Coan

  Right.

  Nicole Prause

  Preferences.

  Jim Coan

  So why not orgasm?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, that has pretty universal positive regard.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah. And it's true. And you know, it must irritate you. I know it irritates you that it's not used more commonly. It irritates me. When I did one of these interviews with David Barlow. And we were talking about the Barlow Strain Gauge, which people may or may not know, is a- what is it exactly?

  Nicole Prause

  It's a mechanical strain gauge that fits around the mid shaft of the penis. It's an open C kind of. So it's metal, but it expands easily, because it's not fully enclosed.

  Jim Coan

  Right.

  Nicole Prause

  And just as a simple basic strain gauge on one side of it. We have built them and use them in my research, but they're not very common these days.

  Jim Coan

  So you know, if we were using sort of sexual response to look at approach motivation, to look at positive reward responding and stuff like that, not only do we have a nice concrete measure of response to potential rewards, but we know what it means.

  Nicole Prause

  We have a high specificity.

  Jim Coan

  High specificity.

  Nicole Prause

  Yes. There are lots of great things. I think about sex models that, you know, it's not the answer for everything, obviously. But if you're studying primary rewards, what the hell are you doing with desserts? Get rid of the brownies. Strap a vibrator on him, and let's talk about primary rewards. Seriously.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah. You know what, I'm gonna just write that to my IRB. I'm gonna say, we're getting rid of the brownies and we're strapping a vibrator on him. But you can't really do that, right? You can't really just do that.

  Nicole Prause

  We did it.

  Jim Coan

  How? I mean... I mean, you... Let's get let's back up a little bit cuz I need some any more context.

  Nicole Prause

  Yes.

  Jim Coan

  So what when was that? We first met at SPR, it was like 2002 or 2003 or something? Somewhere around there. Where were you at that time? What were you doing?

  Nicole Prause

  I think I was late stage graduate school maybe or early faculty. So...

  Jim Coan

  Where did you go to grad school?

  Nicole Prause

  Indiana University. So I was sitting there with the Kinsey Institute.

  Jim Coan

  Right. Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  Hiding out there in Indiana.

  Jim Coan

  And did you do work in the Kinsey Institute right away?

  Nicole Prause

  Pretty soon after I got there. I was an undergraduate and I was their lab coordinator for years and then transition to graduate student. So I was in the lab, there psycho phys lab like seven or eight years.

  Jim Coan

  As an undergraduate.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, straight through grad school.

  Jim Coan

  You from Indiana?

  Nicole Prause

  No, hell no. I followed a boy up there.

  Jim Coan

  You followed a boy?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, yes. Yep. Yep. But look what I got!

  Jim Coan

  Look what you got. You got a whole career.

  Nicole Prause

  Lost the boy, got a career.

  Jim Coan

  It's a fair trade. Where'd you come from?

  Nicole Prause

  Texas.

  Jim Coan

  Oh, that's right. Yeah. Where in Texas?

  Nicole Prause

  Southeast. A little town called Beaumont.

  Jim Coan

  Beaumont, Texas. Noted for its openness about sexuality and...

  Nicole Prause

  Difficulty purchasing condoms and hearing what sex is. That also yes.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah? What was it like growing up there? What were your parents doing? What did they do?

  Nicole Prause

  Dad was pediatrician which was a good thing because they were six kids in the family.

  Jim Coan

  Holy shit.

  Nicole Prause

  Indeed. Five girls all causing trouble. So-

  Jim Coan

  Where were you? Were you like the number one or...

  Jim Coan

  Alpha.

  Jim Coan

  You're the oldest?

  Nicole Prause

  Oldest. Absolutely

  Jim Coan

  Sorry.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. Well my bossing failed miserably.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah, it's always always.

  Nicole Prause

  Why don't they just listen to us?

  Jim Coan

  They don't because they're little assholes. That's why.

  Nicole Prause

  I didn't say it. Just for the record, that was Dr. Coan. Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  Beaumont. Your dad's a pediatrician. What's your mom doing?

  Nicole Prause

  She's hanging out at home doing the child raising thing. Yeah. Trying to keep me from talking to him too much about this stuff.

  Jim Coan

  Were you weird early on?

  Nicole Prause

  Yes.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah? How were you weird?

  Nicole Prause

  I think it was you know, most kids worry a lot about fitting in and being normal and not standing out. And I have heard that I hated the idea that I would be like anybody else. And was happy to... You know, I used to wear neckties to school. I have no idea where that came from.

  Jim Coan

  You're doing like an Annie Hall kind of thing.

  Nicole Prause

  Dyeing my hair purple and, you know... Generally I mean, I was a good student. It wasn't rebelled in that way, but just did not want to be normal. Had no interest in it.

  Jim Coan

  You see, in my experience. Teachers love that. Teachers love that kid who does well in school, but is also you know, sort of bucks convention.

  Nicole Prause

  But not too much.

  Jim Coan

  Not too much.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  This is Beaumont.

  Nicole Prause

  Within within range.

  Jim Coan

  Did you get along with your teachers okay?

  Nicole Prause

  Oh, yeah. I mean, it was a school that was very low socioeconomic. We have a lot of oil refineries in town. So people are working factory type jobs. I was actually the ethnic minority in town. So it was kind of an unusual place to grow up. It was one of, I've heard, the last city to integrate the schools. So just a very checkered past.

  Jim Coan

  Is it close to the coast? It must be.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, pretty much close to Galveston and Louisiana. So that whole area.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah. And so you met a boy.

  Nicole Prause

  In college.

  Jim Coan

  In college. Did you go to Indiana right away?

  Nicole Prause

  No. So I started out a little school in San Antonio where I met him. He was older. So he went for graduate school before I did. For music up in Indiana, where music is quite good. Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  It is?

  Nicole Prause

  Its excellent.

  Jim Coan

  The department.

  Nicole Prause

  Often ranked only behind Juilliard.

  Jim Coan

  You're kidding.

  Nicole Prause

  Very good.

  Jim Coan

  I don't know anything.

  Nicole Prause

  I- Right? I would not have guessed Indiana, and yet they have amazing opera, amazing chamber music. Just things you would never have imagined in the middle of-

  Jim Coan

  And the Kinsey Institute.

  Nicole Prause

  And the Kinsey Institute. Were a bunch of weirdos up there.

  Jim Coan

  So you liked Indiana?

  Nicole Prause

  I loved it. If it had been warmer, I would have stayed.

  Jim Coan

  That's the thing. I don't really, I mean, it makes sense to me now that you're in Los Angeles, studying sex, because... Why? Because people have sex in Los Angeles. Sex, you know, the further east you go, especially northeast, people don't have sex. They sort of huddled together grimly in corners and sip cold coffee.

  Nicole Prause

  That is not true.

  Jim Coan

  It is true.

  Nicole Prause

  That is not true. It's a larger population here. So whatever you're interested in studying, you can find it. If you want to study men who have sex with men, it's hard to do in Bloomington. Of course, they're there.

  Jim Coan

  They're there.

  Nicole Prause

  But it's a very small group, less visible, harder to recruit. Similar kinds of things for sexual risk behavior. Of course, there are people in Bloomington, Indiana get in all kinds of trouble, but they're such a large group of them in large cities, including Los Angeles. This is the place to be.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah, yeah. Access.

  Nicole Prause

  Totally.

  Jim Coan

  So why is Kinsey in Indiana. Is that just where he was from, or what?

  Nicole Prause

  Alfred Kinsey was a zoologist at Indiana University for many years before he started studying sexual behaviors. So, his institute kind of grew out of that.

  Jim Coan

  Transformed.

  Nicole Prause

  Indeed, and ended up with a lot of sociologists in it and now has gotten very, very tiny. And there's some question about-

  Jim Coan

  Lack of funding?

  Nicole Prause

  A lack of funding and lots of political attacks that are pretty direct on their existence.

  Jim Coan

  And this becomes a theme for you for your whole career.

  Nicole Prause

  Yep.

  Jim Coan

  Okay, well, I want to get there. But so you start working at Kinsey as an undergraduate.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, I think I did a semester as a research assistant and then just loved it. Was there hanging out for fun reading articles for no reason. Just nerding out on sex.

  Jim Coan

  Nerding out on sex. Okay. That's interesting. Because what kind of research were you working on at that time?

  Nicole Prause

  The very first trial I was involved with was measuring vaginal responses in postmenopausal women. They were taking a drug that they thought might have negative sexual effects, or positive sexual effects and just wanted to understand more about that.

  Jim Coan

  It's super important.

  Nicole Prause

  It was right. First thing in the door, I mean, sexual effects are still the number one reason people discontinue antidepressant medications.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  And yet, we know jack about how to address those problems. So we just take them off the pill and keep swapping them on other pills. Well this kind of a similar thing.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah. That's what comes up in the abnormal class that I teach in undergraduates is that sexual issues, whether it's sort of understanding normal sex and how people enjoy it, or sexual dysfunctions, it's in surprising ways goes to the core of who we are. You know, our identity, our sort of reason for getting up in the morning. You know, it's involved in so much of this stuff. It's amazing to me in some ways that we don't pay more attention to it.

  Nicole Prause

  And yet, if you ask those abnormal psych students, I think, you know, many of them say, Well, it's a nice to have. They don't see it as sexual.

  Jim Coan

  That's right. Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  So yeah.

  Jim Coan

  They're wrong.

  Nicole Prause

  Well-

  Jim Coan

  They'll learn that more as they get older.

  Nicole Prause

  In fairness, you know, I've come to think in some ways they're right. So one of the errors and argument I think we've been making as a field is trying to say, Gosh darn it, women deserve pleasure. And we should have orgasms and all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, that's nice. But if you can't feed your family, don't anybody care about how often you have an orgasm.

  Jim Coan

  That's right.

  Nicole Prause

  So yeah, if you want to argue for why do we need to know about this stuff? I think there are many other things that happen when your genitals are stimulated when you're sexually aroused, whether it's the cognitive state or the biology of what's happening, that we can use and addressing general health issues. And I think we've been dumb as a field and trying to continue to beat our head against a brick wall say orgasms are important. Some people are never going to care, and you're not going to convince them. But if I tell you, orgasms do something similar to what an antidepressant medication does and I can get you off your antidepressants. Now I've got your ear.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah. Well, that's good. And that's important. And it's not just- That doesn't sound to me like it's just PR.

  Nicole Prause

  This is real. Yeah, we can look at overlaps. In you know, the other example in this domain is many people masturbate to help themselves fall asleep at night. And yet, masturbation doesn't appear in any of the sleep assessments or the treatment manuals. So why don't we know anything about... Like, how should you? If you're going to try and do this, should you do it when you're laying in bed? Should you do an hour before you're gonna go to bed? Like what is it about that that seems to be facilitating sleep?

  Jim Coan

  So it's not the fact- It's not only the fact that masturbating before sleep can help you sleep. That's a finding?

  Nicole Prause

  No, this is the other thing it's not a finding. No one-

  Jim Coan

  People report that?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  People report that they do that.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. And so we all as human beings think we know this to be the case. I'm guilty of having told magazines like Oh, yes, you can facilitate sleep. And then I went and actually looked for the science and I was like, Oh shit.

  Jim Coan

  There's no data.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, I was talking out of my ass on accident. And so now I try and correct myself but you know, it's-

  Jim Coan

  But maybe it does.

  Nicole Prause

  Oh, presumably it does. You inject your rodents with with a bunch of vasopressin that we know escalates when you have an orgasm. They start yawning like crazy and conk out.

  Jim Coan

  Is that really true?

  Nicole Prause

  They're adorable when they're yawning.

  Jim Coan

  I bet they are. Little Disney cartoon.

  Nicole Prause

  They are! They really are.

  Jim Coan

  Okay, so So you're at Kinsey, as an undergraduate. You're looking at vaginal response in postmenopausal women. Do you feel hooked to these kinds of questions right away?

  Nicole Prause

  Immediately.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  And it did. Honestly, early on it was partly purian interest. I mean, this is like Oh my god!

  Jim Coan

  It's stimulating just thinking about it.

  Nicole Prause

  I'm looking at the vagina and I'm screening porn for my studies and-

  Jim Coan

  You're screening porn?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, my advisor and I have to talk about whether or not to include anal and you know.

  Jim Coan

  In the porn?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. And kind of like, why do we screen this kind of content out? And what do we think about letting people select for BDSM content or like... Those things when you're young or facinating.

  Jim Coan

  Oh, my God. Well, you know, it really is like the nuclear power of psychological responding and affective responding isn't it?

  Nicole Prause

  High positive affect.

  Jim Coan

  High positive, high arousal right? It's that you know, if you look at the IAPS slides you know, the International Affective Pictures System. The only thing that they can find that gives both high positive effect and high arousal are sexually explicit images.

  Nicole Prause

  And that's with their bad porn. I got better stuff.

  Jim Coan

  Just in case-

  Jim Coan

  Not to brag, but to brag.

  Jim Coan

  So you said you went to graduate school also in Indiana?

  Nicole Prause

  Stayed there.

  Jim Coan

  Stayed there? And who'd you work with?

  Nicole Prause

  I had a funny dual advisorship. So I was actually in the clinical science program. So I was-

  Jim Coan

  You were a clinical degree.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, clinical science. And so Peter Finn, who does alcoholism research was my first collaborator. Does love ERP work simultaneously with Eric Johnson, who was a scientist at the Kinsey Institute, and then ended up mainly actually working in a schizophrenia lab with Bill Hetrick.

  Jim Coan

  Interesting. Lots of opportunity to learn different kinds of things.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. And his lab was doing really advanced processing for the time of like components analysis stuff. That was novel for electroencephalography at the time. So I was doing a lot of methods learning in his laboratory. But then also picked up a bunch of attentional tasks and things that today are coming back around.

  Jim Coan

  Isn't that funny, how that happens? It becomes part of your tool box.

  Nicole Prause

  Pay attention in class.

  Jim Coan

  Right? Learn stuff.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah. Okay. So but you're learning all of these techniques. Do you continue studying sexual responses and sexual responding in grad school?

  Nicole Prause

  I did the whole time. And I think in hindsight, that was a mistake. And I usually tell grad students this as well. I said, You know, if you're going to study this stuff, go for it, but do it in the context of something else. It is a very risky career move in the US to be a sex researcher and to have that identity. So you will have a much easier time as a candidate and for moving forward in your career if you specialize in a different area and just add sex on as like an additional specialty.

  Jim Coan

  It's so depressing to me somehow. I mean, you know, I've been one way or another studying relationships since 1991.

  Nicole Prause

  I'm about to bully you go ahead.

  Jim Coan

  I mean sex is one of the core elements. It's one of the absolutely core elements. And to this day, I still don't know much about it. I mean, I don't know much about it.

  Nicole Prause

  Your poor wife.

  Jim Coan

  I don't know much about it. I mean, nobody knows. I don't know much about the literature, the scientific literature on it.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. You and I don't speak. This is a larger field problem.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  I don't know. I mean, I also was a marital therapist, and I taught couples therapy and did all that good stuff. And we have both had coding training. For you much more in depth than I have about how to look at couples disagreements. But, that's about where it stops.

  Jim Coan

  Right.

  Nicole Prause

  And vice versa. That is the marital people, the couples people, and the sex people often aren't talking.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah, it's a real problem. It's a real problem. And I've done marital therapy too. And I've worked with couples who are suffering from sexual dysfunctions of various kinds. And I sort of dig into some of the literature on that a little bit. But a lot of that, frankly, is Masters and Johnson. It still goes back for a long time.

  Nicole Prause

  Well, so this- I have a bone to pick with your old advisors. So like, we just had a big marital researcher, Gottman, who said, You know, well, sex therapy doesn't work. We've always known it doesn't work.

  Jim Coan

  Oh, I didn't know he said that.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, it's just came out like a few days ago. And there's still kind of this broad idea that right, we don't know what we're doing. And there are some aspects of sex and sexual dysfunction where that's still the case. Sexual desire has been really difficult to get a handle on, to make progress with. But there are also some domains, we kill it. You know, so if you are treating someone who has pain disorder, you better know that literature.

  Nicole Prause

  Vaginismus or something like that. Yeah, so disprunia broadly. Some more commonly like vulva vestibulitis is more common. But we have excellent treatments for sexual pain.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah, no, that's the way I always understood it. The treatment for a lot of different kinds of sexual dysfunctions. I mean, it may be like second only to like, primary anxiety problems in terms of treatment efficacy.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, some of the data are quite good.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah. And they've been around for a long time, and people don't access them.

  Nicole Prause

  Well, it's funny-

  Jim Coan

  Bcause they're ashamed.

  Nicole Prause

  That could be that or, like you mentioned the Masters and Johnson, it's still like- The most common sexual problem women report is still low desire problems. Now culturally, that shifted to where the women turn around and point the finger at the guys and say, No, your drive is too high. You're a sex addict. But that's a whole other issue.

  Jim Coan

  I thought you were gonna say, You guys don't know how to make us interested. It's a little bit of a different -

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, that's the ball problem. That's a different diagnosis. So but like that is where a lot of people are still using sensate focus, that Old Masters and Johnson stuff. and there's some data to support it but not strong stuff. So that's one area we still have a lot of people expressing problems and not a lot to offer them, to be fair.

  Jim Coan

  So people expressing problems in terms of like performance anxiety or something? Because that's what I think of when I think of the sensate focus recomendation.

  Nicole Prause

  No. So honestly, like we've given up a lot of the erectile dysfunction to Viagra because there are data suggesting that Viagra has largely psychologic mechanism, which is fascinating.

  Jim Coan

  Viagra?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. In the sense that, depending on what studies you read, you know, somewhere in the order of 40 to 70% of Viagra prescriptions are never refilled. They're picked up once.

  Jim Coan

  That's interesting.

  Nicole Prause

  So right, it could be these are just partiers. So they're picking them up for sex to see to take with ecstasy for a party or something that's possible. But that can't be that many of the prescriptions could it? So the other kind of big idea is that people get this Viagra or whatever cialis they're using. They have some really positive sexual experiences and get their confidence back. And then they dropped the pills. Yep. So it was a psychologic mechanism, but using a biologic intervention.

  Jim Coan

  Is that only like 20 or 30% of people who take Viagra don't find it effective? I heard that statistic somewhere along the line.

  Nicole Prause

  I don't know is the bottom line. There are lots of things-

  Jim Coan

  That could be wrong, by the way.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, that could disrupt that cascade. So you know, I always say Viagra won't make her pretty. So if you don't have central activation, that is if you don't see a competent sexual stimulus in front of you. Viagra will do nothing. You can take it and you don't just get an erection, you have to have your brain telling you I see a sexual thing.

  Jim Coan

  Right.

  Nicole Prause

  And if your brain won't tell you that, the bagger won't work.

  Jim Coan

  I see. I didn't know that. Because you also hear about people who take Viagra and have the five hour erection have to go to the hospital.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's preventing the breakdown of something that allows the penile muscle to relax. But that means that that has to be in the area of the penis to begin with, and how does it get there? You have sexual thoughts. So without the sexual thoughts, there's nothing there to prevent the breakdown of for these, you know, cialis, Viagra PD five inhibitor type medicines.

  Jim Coan

  So, back to graduate school, what are you starting to focus on in terms of sexual questions, sexual psychophysiology? Is that what you think of what you do? You do do psychophysiology of sex?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, I use the broader term. So sometimes I use neuroscientists because I see that as...

  Jim Coan

  We've all gone there.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. You want to be sexy, you gotta be in neuro. Fascinating. So yeah, I was doing all kinds of things to do with drive and coherence and sexual arousal. Really basic science questions. So just-

  Jim Coan

  Coherence being?

  Nicole Prause

  The match between what people's physiology is doing and what they say they're feeling.

  Jim Coan

  That's disrupted? People aren't good reporters of...

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, so this is nothing new in emotion psychophysiology. You know, this is the tripartite model of fear from ages ago, where, yes, Lang's work trying to understand when these systems agree or disagree. We have the same types of issues and sex, but we think we discovered it because we're narcissists. So we pretend like we have to figure this out for the first time. But the truth is, like, it has a long history of trying to understand when people's experiences match what their bodies are doing and when they fail to match what their bodies are doing. And so one of the often repeated findings in our field is men's coherence is very high. That is, if they say they're sexually aroused, they have an erection.

  Jim Coan

  Maybe that's why I'm feeling confused right now. Because I'm like, wait, but sex is so specific. I mean, how can you not know?

  Nicole Prause

  How could you not know. Well, and women it's a lot more variable we think.

  Jim Coan

  How does that manifest? So you can have what?

  Nicole Prause

  Usually there's a body response. So you show women porn and contrary to popular belief, women are also very visual. We don't have any reason to think that's different in women.

  Jim Coan

  Really? They're as responsive to porn as men are?

  Nicole Prause

  If you control for the level of sexual desire, there is no gender difference.

  Jim Coan

  What do you mean control? How do you control for the level of sexual desire?

  Nicole Prause

  There are a few ways. So most people use questionnaires. We have started using a neurological measure, but that's quite new.

  Jim Coan

  Wow.

  Nicole Prause

  If you basically-

  Jim Coan

  So you ask them how interested in sex they are?

  Nicole Prause

  Traits, sexual desire.

  Jim Coan

  Okay.

  Nicole Prause

  Day to day, you want to have sex? How interested are you? How often are you thinking about it? Thinking about it with intention? I want to do something about it. I'm not just worrying about it.

  Jim Coan

  Right.

  Nicole Prause

  And if you control for that, those gender differences go away, largely. So I know. So we're doing all these things.

  Jim Coan

  That couldn't be more different from the popular conciousness.

  Nicole Prause

  Right? Men are not from Mars. We're from the same planet.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah. Okay, so given that they're all equally responsive. After you adjust for trait sexual interest, you nevertheless find that men are really good at tracking their own sexual arousal and women are not so good at it or what's the story?

  Nicole Prause

  We have all reported that finding many times, but there are lots of big questions marks about it because if women on average have lower sex drive, you have a stimulus matching problem. Are you really getting the women in the lab as aroused as you got the men in the lab? And because we have different genitalia, we can't equate the genital response very easily.

  Jim Coan

  Because men, you can measure it more easily.

  Nicole Prause

  We can well-

  Jim Coan

  Maybe that's-

  Nicole Prause

  We measure it differently

  Jim Coan

  Differently?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  Barlow strain gauge.

  Nicole Prause

  There's this. Yeah. And you can, like you can measure temperature on both the penis and the vulva. But are those equivalent structures?

  Jim Coan

  Because of the blood flow into them?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, they both get hotter.

  Jim Coan

  It gets engorged too, right?

  Nicole Prause

  Engorged and hotter, and all of these processes. But it's not clear. When we show a stimulus, we have a hard time getting stimulus equivalence with these. Or demonstrating that because of the different genitalia. So there's this question of, are we really getting the men and women equally cognitively aroused? So we've done work showing like if you get the women more aroused than usual, like if you show them weaker and stronger stimuli, the coherence does increase. And of course, there is the issue with the guys, of course, all you have to do is look down. They know what we're measuring.

  Jim Coan

  There's lots of visual feedback.

  Nicole Prause

  There's so many, so many lines of feedback for them. And it's difficult to remove those. So even if you, like there was a study where they hung a curtain across their lap back in the day. And you still know like, there's proprioceptive feedback. They can feel it's kind of on my leg.

  Jim Coan

  It's not hard to know.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, I'm guessing. But you know? It's difficult to remove that feedback to really test that hypothesis.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah. So was your dissertation on this sort of coherence question or?

  Nicole Prause

  My dissertation was testing Barlows model: sexual functioning.

  Jim Coan

  Which part of it? The excitation transfer part or the...

  Nicole Prause

  So I was trying to look at whether kind of emotional reactivity to sexual cues or attention to sexual cues better predicted reported sex drive. And of course, in hindsight, many problems with what I did.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah, that never happens with a dissertation ever, ever.

  Nicole Prause

  So at the time, I found really strong effects in our attentional measure. Kind of supporting Barlow's idea, but very little to nothing in terms of the emotional reactivity. So the conclusion of me at that time was... I mean Barlow was on my dissertation committee.

  Jim Coan

  He was?

  Nicole Prause

  He was as an external member. Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  He's a nice guy.

  Nicole Prause

  Oh, yeah. I was like, Hi, I partially falsified your model. I'm really sorry. He was great about it.

  Jim Coan

  Sure.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  Wow. Okay. So here you are. Here you are you're finishing up grad school. You've got David Barlow on your dissertation committee. Now we start getting into some new territory for you, it seems to me. We just talked about this a little bit anecdotally over the years, but you go on the job market.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. And I'm thinking probably postdoc because that's like, 95% of what we do. And then I got an offer from a little school in Idaho.

  Jim Coan

  Idaho?

  Nicole Prause

  Idaho.

  Jim Coan

  Where in Idaho?

  Nicole Prause

  Pocatello, Idaho.

  Jim Coan

  I know Pocatello.

  Nicole Prause

  How the hell do you know Pocatello, Idaho?

  Jim Coan

  I went to junior high in high school in Spokane, Washington.

  Nicole Prause

  Whoa.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah. Whoa, is right. Isn't that weird?

  Nicole Prause

  Nobody knows Pocatello.

  Jim Coan

  It's Trump land.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, I don't know how I got out alive. I was pretty sure the pitchforks were coming.

  Jim Coan

  Pocatello, Idaho. So yeah. So what is the university there? It's...

  Nicole Prause

  Idaho State.

  Jim Coan

  Idaho State.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. And so I made the decision, rather than-

  Jim Coan

  Beacuse the University of Idaho is in Moscow.

  Nicole Prause

  Well, and Boise I think has one.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah. Maybe so yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  So I just made the decision to rather you know, you can wait on the job market and see what happens with your postdoc offers maybe. Or I had this offer in hand to run an independent laboratory already. So at age 29, I walked into Idaho State.

  Jim Coan

  Pocatello.

  Nicole Prause

  Yep.

  Jim Coan

  Well, you're from Beaumont, you can handle Pocatello.

  Nicole Prause

  Oh my god. Barely barely.

  Jim Coan

  What happened?

  Nicole Prause

  Um, it was an interesting place. I mean, it's a small department. And I was the only psycho physiologist there. So the biggest challenge-

  Jim Coan

  Yeah, there's currency there.

  Nicole Prause

  There's currency. But there's also a lot of suspicion, I think, in terms of like this new technique. What is this person doing? Are they going to take all our resources? And so I didn't have supports there, like the engineering department I had at Indiana where anything you needed, they would make downstairs.

  Jim Coan

  Isn't that nice?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. And so all of a sudden, I'm like-

  Jim Coan

  Get used to that and you're in trouble.

  Nicole Prause

  Crap. I've got to learn how to build stuff and I am not an electrician. And-

  Jim Coan

  I just can't tell you how much I relate to this.

  Nicole Prause

  So you know what we do, of course, we find John Curtin. He was a great psycho physiologist,

  Jim Coan

  At Wisconsin.

  Nicole Prause

  And flew him out with

  Jim Coan

  A job!

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, the trade of some scheme.

  Jim Coan

  This is like 2000 what, 2002?

  Nicole Prause

  2008. Yeah, so I had an internship out in Boston.

  Jim Coan

  So when we met at SPR you were just a little person.

  Nicole Prause

  I was a wee wee thing.

  Jim Coan

  In grad school.

  Nicole Prause

  But I was fresh off of that SPR, you know, meeting still in my head. And so that was one of the first things we did was looking at alpha asymmetry in sexual motivation.

  Jim Coan

  So you had an EEG system.

  Nicole Prause

  I set up an EEG system.

  Jim Coan

  Do you remember what you got? What do you get?

  Nicole Prause

  Neuroscan. Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  Did you get a 32 channel?

  Nicole Prause

  Of course. And we started on basic Alfei symmetry study to replicate basically, some of yall's work in pleasure motivation domain. Partially did that.

  Jim Coan

  How'd it go? Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  My sense of that was we just threw fire at it. The effect sizes are so large with sexual stimuli that we got strong Alpha suppression.

  Jim Coan

  They just went from being human to mammal. They just went all mammal on you.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, alpha is a direct indicator of mammal, for anyone who didn't know. Who needs fMRI. Yeah. And then I shortly after got a grant that first year, from the Alcoholic Beverage Medical Research Foundation to study the effects of alcohol on sexual response. So that was a big part of what we were doing the next couple of years.

  Jim Coan

  Another important question.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. Whiskey dick. People are worried.

  Jim Coan

  Whiskey dick.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  Whiskey dick? Is that a thing? You just said whiskey dick?

  Nicole Prause

  It's totally a thing.

  Jim Coan

  It's a thing?

  Nicole Prause

  Well, not in my lab, it's not. But guys claim it is.

  Jim Coan

  Okay. But did this grant help you? First of all, I can't believe we're talking about whiskey dick. Is there another term for it? Is that the term?

  Nicole Prause

  Impaired erectile functioning with alcohol consumption.

  Jim Coan

  Okay, sure. Whiskey dick. Let's go back to whickey dick. So did you study whiskey dick?

  Nicole Prause

  What we were interested in was we had some data from grad school when I was working with Peter Finn, showing this really cool effect, where we always kind of assumed that you know, you drink alcohol, you get stupid, right? So the more you drink, the more you'll do. And that was what was causing people to take sexual risks when they're drunk.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  Turns out, that's not really the case. It's all mediated through sexual arousal. And we had found that and an independent laboratory in Seattle found that effect as well. So we're following up on that work. Looking at when you give people alcohol, either low or high doses or a placebo, what better predicts their shifts in risky decision making if you present them with potential partners?Because of course, we can't present them with real partners, because we're conservative and stupid. I should be able to present them with real partners. Anyway.

  Jim Coan

  Like real partners like, right-

  Nicole Prause

  Why not?

  Jim Coan

  To have sex in the laboratory?

  Nicole Prause

  Why not?

  Jim Coan

  Yeah. I mean, Aaron had people come in and make out.

  Nicole Prause

  I'm jealous.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  We can do these analogs better than what we were doing. But this is what we're doing at the time was kind of accepted vignette analogues of sexual risk behaviors. But then we try and generalize this case, though. Like one of the main reasons people say they take methamphetamines and cocaine to a lesser extent, but especially methamphetamines is sexual enhancement. The number one reason we know nothing about how meth actually affects sexual response, I've made several night applications as have colleagues, and we can't make any headway on it because it's just this weird... We shouldn't study that. It's, you know, too much. We don't what

  Jim Coan

  Do you get that in reviews? Or do you get- Because you know, the thing is, especially when you're talking about NIH, there's the reviews of your peers on the one hand. And that's one determinant. And then there's the funding priority of the agency.

  Nicole Prause

  Yes.

  Jim Coan

  And so I guess, it would seem less likely to me that your peers would be saying this is not something you can study and more likely that the NIH would be saying, This is not something we can support.

  Nicole Prause

  So the funny thing is, I don't know that my peers are all in those panels yet. I think we're mostly dealing, theoretically, because these are anonymous, of course, to some extent. I mean we know broadly the panel make up.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  But not who particularly started your review. We would often get feedback that we read to be cryptic as things like we don't think you'll get enough volunteers for the study. Which we thought was hysterical because we turn them away left and right. We get tons of volunteers.

  Jim Coan

  Are you- really?

  Nicole Prause

  We get this feedback repeatedly.

  Jim Coan

  Well, I mean, if I were asked to predict whether you could get people...

  Nicole Prause

  Right?

  Jim Coan

  To come into the laboratory and have sex. I would say Yeah, nobody's gonna do that.

  Nicole Prause

  Right? It's a terrible thing to do. Nobody-

  Jim Coan

  No, no, of course, not that it's a terrible thing to do. No, no, no. It's a fine thing to do. It's an important thing to do. We should do it. But will people do it. I mean, people won't do it.

  Nicole Prause

  My favorite example, so we did a brain stimulation study where we stimulate people's genitals with a vibrator. So you might see-

  Jim Coan

  You stimulated there?

  Nicole Prause

  We had it programmed in a computer so that-

  Jim Coan

  But you weren't like...

  Nicole Prause

  I was not personally holding the vibrator with my hands.

  Jim Coan

  That would be strange.

  Nicole Prause

  I was holding it with TTL pulses on the other side of the wall. Through my computer.

  Jim Coan

  Okay.

  Nicole Prause

  But that study, we literally posted this ad on Craigslist in the casual counter section for like 30 minutes and had 240 phone calls and emails to the point where our staff came in and said, Can you please take the ad down? Because we can't use our phones! Like people were clogging the lines. So yeah, this is on a random weekday on Craigslist in LA.

  Jim Coan

  But then this raises the question, how generalizable are those people?

  Nicole Prause

  They were exactly who we wanted. We were looking for high risk sexual- Yep. Got em.

  Jim Coan

  Good job.

  Nicole Prause

  Thanks. Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  But that's in LA.

  Nicole Prause

  That's in LA.

  Jim Coan

  So how'd you get from Pocatello to LA?

  Nicole Prause

  I went a long path. From three years as an assistant professor there and was limited in a few different ways. I was the first person to ever submit an RO1. That is the large grant mechanism through that department. Which meant I just didn't have a lot of support there. So I went to Mind Research Network, which is an independent research facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico on the campus of University of New Mexico. And, yeah, I got there six months later. They got bought by Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute Leery and completely changed their direction and funding.

  Jim Coan

  And they gave you the boots or what?

  Nicole Prause

  No! I had, when I walked in, a two year contract. And so I completed that contract. But I knew essentially that it was not likely to be extended because the agency priorities shifted soon after I got there. So I got back on the job market. You know, in this case, ended up at UCLA in the gambling studies program of all places.

  Jim Coan

  The gambling studies program.

  Nicole Prause

  Yes. Think reward I'm also reward. So they are using-

  Jim Coan

  That's right of course, yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  They're doing secondary reinforcers.

  Jim Coan

  Oh, yeah. And plus, now you can start confirming the existence of sex addiction.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, that's pretty much what I came there for. You know, it was to prove that sex was addicting and bad and stinky.

  Jim Coan

  I lost you at stinky but I was there with everything else.

  Nicole Prause

  Well, it's bad. You know this right?

  Jim Coan

  Right. You went to the- What was it called again? The gambling...

  Nicole Prause

  Gambling studies program.

  Jim Coan

  Studies program.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  And this is affiliated with what school?

  Nicole Prause

  I'm in department psychiatry when I was at UCLA. And they were unique in that that particular program was the only one I believe that had a state contract. So when you go and buy a gambling ticket or something in the state of California, some proportion of that money has to go back for the treatment of people who end up with gambling problems. And this was part of what the state had funded to help ameliorate those difficulties people sometimes encounter

  Jim Coan

  Got it. So how did it go? What did you started up your study? So now, this seems like a different thing now. You've studied sort of qualities of sexual function. But now you're studying sex.

  Nicole Prause

  Right. So at this point, you know, we use porn and a lot of studies. The porn addiction tests we had done actually, were back in Idaho. You know, we'd collected them there. And at this point, I'm getting really tired of having to make this logical leap in what exactly was the porn doing? You know, we were having...

  Jim Coan

  What was the logical leap?

  Nicole Prause

  Things like, you know, how do we think about what porn is actually doing? Are people responding to the stimulus they're seeing, or are they seeing the stimulus and using it as fantasy material? And that's creating individual differences. So some people are more effective than others at generating fantasy and therefore generating their own arousal.

  Jim Coan

  Right. Okay, so am I watching a kind of a prosthetic for my own fantasies or am I-

  Nicole Prause

  Like am I watching the porn or am I good fantasizer? So these kinds of issues you just can't easily take apart because there's no dipstick for sexual fantasy. Yeah, because Oh, well, they have three units of fantasy.

  Jim Coan

  Right. Right.

  Nicole Prause

  But there are dipsticks for vibrators.

  Jim Coan

  Or dipsticks for vibrators? I don't understand. What are you talking about?

  Nicole Prause

  When I was at Idaho, we did a study of common vibratory stimulation devices. We slapped an accelerometer on them.

  Jim Coan

  You were studying different devices?

  Jim Coan

  Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  Because you were comparing the utility of the devices for research or you just wanted to know about different devices?

  Nicole Prause

  So it was-

  Jim Coan

  Making consumer recommendations?

  Nicole Prause

  Long term, I knew I wanted to move towards that kind of a model and away from films.

  Jim Coan

  Oh you mean, so not showing porn but just directly

  Nicole Prause

  Yes, actually sexual stimulation, I would love to go straight to partners. But I think it was too risky in the US to make that jump. So the in between jump was to try to do genital stimulation through some other means. And we knew vibrators work on guys, too. There was a -

  Jim Coan

  They do?

  Nicole Prause

  Oh, hell yeah. There's a whole series of studies from the Netherlands showing this very well.

  Jim Coan

  How?

  Nicole Prause

  How not?

  Jim Coan

  Okay. I don't know.I don't understand the mechanics of it.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. So the guys in the Netherlands used to use little bullet vibrators, and they would wrap them around just under the tip of the penis. On like, underneath, which is known to be a very sensitive spot very commonly stimulated during masturbation by men's report. And they would turn these suckers on and leave them and see how long it took them to reach orgasm. And they would use this as a model for understanding what was called premature ejaculation at the time now called rapid ejaculation. And-

  Jim Coan

  Oh that's interesting.

  Nicole Prause

  So, right? We knew this was likely to work even though of course, when we test guys, they always make clear to us when we walk in, Well, you know, I don't normally do this, but for science. Okay, whatever, buddy. Doesn't matter. Put it on. So, yeah. We had slapped a piezo electric accelerometer on these vibrators just to get a sense of what are people using exactly. Like what is the displacement characteristic of a typical vibrator? And ones that are more commonly used to reach orgasm, how do those differ? Is it really in frequency? Or is it displacement? Because these are two different properties. So displacement is how much the housing outside the device in this case is actually moving from a center point? And frequency is how fast it's doing that.

  Jim Coan

  Right. Right.

  Nicole Prause

  So how much is it really literally like beating back and forth versus just doing whatever it's doing really quickly? Yeah. And one paper before it suggested displacement. And we found some data suggesting similar. Like, it's probably more the displacement than the frequency. These are good things to know for when you circle back around and you want to develop now a device to stimulate someone in the laboratory.

  Jim Coan

  Right. Because you want to do it the best way.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, yeah. Like when you're starting from scratch, essentially, what do you put on them first? You know, what's the first thing in the door? And it's a tremendous problem. This is where bias is a huge issue. Because, you know, as a sexual person, I admit it. I had sex.

  Jim Coan

  No.

  Nicole Prause

  I know, right? So we have our biases, because our own personal experiences of like, well, this works. This is how this thing works. Yeah, well, maybe just for you. Might not be any other human.

  Jim Coan

  And there might even be individual differences with you know, what kind of...

  Nicole Prause

  Yes, yeah. So we had to have some idea of like, what was common? What's typical?

  Jim Coan

  Did you settle on an answer?

  Nicole Prause

  We ended up using really high displacement device.

  Jim Coan

  High displacement?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  And frequency doesn't matter as much?

  Nicole Prause

  Well, so you can- Obviously they're somewhat well, they're somewhat correlated. Because if you increase the frequency, it can create whiplash. Yeah. So we just basically had the sense from these early looks that we wanted a devise, it was pretty intense. We didn't want to start with some cute little bullet vibrator. We're just gonna go all in, you know? Kind of get the strong stuff. Because we wanted to be sure we were able to stimulate people and potentially orgasm eventually.

  Jim Coan

  And why, exactly? Why were you making them orgasm?

  Nicole Prause

  The orgasm study started because we were looking at reward responsiveness and depression. And of course, many, many people have found that Greg Segal, our colleague in Pittsburg.

  Jim Coan

  And good buddy.

  Nicole Prause

  Yes. And you're found you know, people with depression tend to experience pleasant stimuli, but they rapidly dampen those experiences. And this is associated with activity and the VMPFC. And this suggested or could be, that if they had a sufficiently strong positive stimulus, maybe they wouldn't be able to dampen it. That is, is this a skill they could acquire? Or is it something that was deficient in their ability to process the stimulus? So, let's just give them something they can't stop, you know? A really strong undeniably positive reward, primary reward, and see if we saw differences and responsiveness. Now, to get there, we didn't start with depressed people. Of course, you have to establish it in right a normative sample.

  Jim Coan

  Sure. And the procedure and...

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, like how the hell do you provoke this? Where do we set it up?

  Jim Coan

  Can we get people into the laboratory, and..

  Nicole Prause

  I never had a question about that. That's you. I have no questions about getting people in the lab.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah, okay. So can we just talk really quickly about what they actually do?

  Jim Coan

  Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  So they come to the laboratory. How does a person have an orgasm in your laboratory? That would be- I would be... I would feel discomfort.

  Nicole Prause

  So they don't obviously just walk in and slap down. No you know, we have the typical informed consent, they fill out questionnaires online, they do cognitive tasks at a computer when they're sitting upright, fully clothed. So we have some interaction with them beforehand. And this all occurs in a private room. We use massage tables, but essentially gynecological exam tables is what we would have used also work just as well. And, you know, we get these folks set up, we're trying to measure their brain response during all of this. So we got the additional complication of you're not just having an orgasm in the lab, but we've also got you tied down to six other things.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  We've got respiration on you. We've got galvanic skin response, electromyography, heart rates. You know, we're pulling everything we can because these data are so unique. We're all in.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah, that's good.

  Nicole Prause

  And for variety of reasons. So after we get your poor self strapped down to this table, essentially, and different levels of strapped down, depending on kind of how the instruments fit you and what your preferences are. These people are typically disrobed or if they have a dress, they might pull the dress up, and we get the vibrator in the vicinity of their genitals and leave the room. So we have this Hitachi magic wand mounted on a microphone stand. And-

  Jim Coan

  What's a Hitachi med magic wand?

  Nicole Prause

  Oh my god. Well, it is probably the most popular stimulation device used for sexual enhancement and it's recommended. It's a vibrator. Yeah. And it appears in becoming orgasmic. The classic text of treating an orgasmia it's been around a long, long time.

  Jim Coan

  Okay, so that's attached to a microphone stand?

  Nicole Prause

  Taped to my microphone stand with bunting to like, dampen the vibration that is sheared off to the stand. Hey, how would you do this?

  Jim Coan

  Hey, no!

  Nicole Prause

  Come on, man.

  Jim Coan

  I told you I was gonna giggle

  Nicole Prause

  This is hard science. So then the question is like, you've got this thing. Then what? Like how for the guys, are we going to try and chase their penis around as they start to get hard with this thing? Like what's going to happen? And so we decided- Seriously! It's gonna flip around. It doesn't just stay in one place.

  Jim Coan

  What's gonna flip around?

  Nicole Prause

  The penis!

  Jim Coan

  Okay, yeah, that's what I thought you meant.

  Nicole Prause

  So it's flacid and then it gets hard flips up right. See the penis works this way.

  Jim Coan

  So, okay, let's just talk women. I can't- There's too many flippin' devices and bodyparts. So women are in their... You set?

  Nicole Prause

  Yes. So we have-

  Jim Coan

  I'm so sorry. I'm laughing so hard. This is not good. This is

  Nicole Prause

  It's great.

  Jim Coan

  You set the vibrator...

  Nicole Prause

  With an attachment for clitoral hood.

  Jim Coan

  To the what?

  Nicole Prause

  For the clitoral hood.

  Jim Coan

  For the clitoris. So attachment for the Hitachi magic wand?

  Jim Coan

  Yes.

  Jim Coan

  That's designed for the clitoral hood.?

  Nicole Prause

  That's where we have applied it.

  Jim Coan

  Okay. And you hand it to them?

  Nicole Prause

  We wiggle it over to them, so it's sitting beside their table.

  Jim Coan

  Okay.

  Nicole Prause

  And we say we're going to leave the room. And we want you to get this in a position such that, you know, we're going to turn it on. So you can kind of sample what the intensity is like. And we also give them a dial beside them that we have-

  Jim Coan

  A rating dial?

  Nicole Prause

  Added not a rating dial but an intensity dial so they have control.

  Jim Coan

  They can set the...

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, we did decide to give up experimental control over that piece. Because we were really concerned that we would potentially choose vibratory thresholds that were far too high and actually make some people in pain. Which obviously we want to avoid.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  We want them aroused, not annoyed.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah. I agree.

  Nicole Prause

  We give them a brief trial period. And then we turn the device off and on an intercom for the next stream, we say, you know, Do you feel like you have it set? Or would you like to try again? If they want to try again, we'll run the 10 second or...

  Jim Coan

  And can you see them?

  Nicole Prause

  No.

  Jim Coan

  They're in totally private room.

  Nicole Prause

  They're totally private room by themselves at this. And yeah, to help facilitate we hope responses. And then the big question comes up, which is, well, then what? My colleague and I had many, many rounds of discussion about this, because there is nothing published on how to do this.

  Jim Coan

  How to tell them...

  Nicole Prause

  Well, like we wanted to control the stimulation pattern.

  Jim Coan

  Oh, my God.

  Nicole Prause

  What should that be?

  Jim Coan

  What are you talking about?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. So he and I have different personal preferences, which I won't get into.

  Jim Coan

  Personal preferences about what?

  Nicole Prause

  About how we thought the pattern should be done. And so we had to acknowledge that we had no idea because obviously he and I had completely different ideas. So it was a-

  Jim Coan

  And different physiologies.

  Nicole Prause

  Different physiology.

  Jim Coan

  So you're talking about how it should be applied to the genitals to create orgasm.

  Nicole Prause

  Yes, we did not know.

  Jim Coan

  You guys were beta testing? Because we're testing this out?

  Nicole Prause

  You know, for science, I decided it was worth the sacrifice.

  Nicole Prause

  Okay. I always try to-

  Jim Coan

  I had to ask.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  I go through all my own protocols.

  Nicole Prause

  Exactly, like people- So this is the parallel. Of course we test ourselves first.

  Jim Coan

  Sure. Sure.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, my favorite side story, if I may.

  Jim Coan

  Yes, you may.

  Nicole Prause

  As we were testing all these various setups, we had trouble with the vibrator shorting out at periods because it's fairly high energy compared to the other devices we were running through this equipment.

  Jim Coan

  Sure that was the circuit?

  Nicole Prause

  Yes. And so my esteemed colleague who made most of the advances on this hardware, eventually thought, Okay, we've got it figured out. So we set up my protocol. I was being run through this time, he was in a separate room. And get to the crucial rather close moment and the device shorts out. He said, I have never seen you so angry.

  Jim Coan

  There's another study you should do.

  Nicole Prause

  I came out and I said-

  Jim Coan

  What happens to people-

  Nicole Prause

  Is it weird we're not writing shit until this gets fixed? Like permanently fixed.

  Jim Coan

  You're gonna inadvertently do a whole different kind of study.

  Nicole Prause

  Yep. Yep.

  Jim Coan

  What happens when people get close and can't?

  Nicole Prause

  Well, so we did a blue ball study, of course inadvertently.

  Jim Coan

  You did do that.

  Nicole Prause

  Inadvertently. This is a-

  Jim Coan

  Okay, because it was shorting out? Where there sparks?

  Nicole Prause

  So many sparks. No, so UCLA didn't want us to do this orgasm study, which is how we ended up doing it at Pittsburgh instead. And-

  Jim Coan

  Wait a minute. Whoa, wait. That I can't go back to that. UCLA wouldn't let you do the orgasm study?

  Nicole Prause

  We became what the ethics chair said was the second study in the history of UCLA to be rejected. And-

  Jim Coan

  What are the hell are you talking about?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, so they didn't cite any safety or confidentiality concerns. Nothing like that.

  Jim Coan

  What the threat to human dignity or safety?

  Nicole Prause

  They never cited one. They never cited one.

  Jim Coan

  They didn't?

  Nicole Prause

  They told us we had to remove the orgasm component, or they would reject the study. And we said that-

  Jim Coan

  Are you shitting me?

  Nicole Prause

  That's the purpose of the study, we won't remove it. And so they said, Well, then your study is rejected. I escalated it as high as I could go as a little junior faculty member.

  Jim Coan

  How long are you here at that point?

  Nicole Prause

  Exactly. So I have a limited contract. And I am in my first year of trying to get pilot data for an NIH grant. And...

  Jim Coan

  Stop it. And let me also say, we started talking about all the methodological details of creating orgasm in the laboratory, because you were applying - this is one of the points that you're making right at the very beginning of our conversation - You're applying it to the study of reward responding-

  Nicole Prause

  To address depression.

  Jim Coan

  To address depression.

  Nicole Prause

  Yes.

  Jim Coan

  And God damn it. As a broad community of clinical psychologists, we turn ourselves into pretzels, trying to find stimuli that are sufficient for the laboratory to study reward, you know, emotional response-

  Nicole Prause

  Oh honey, I gocha. I gocha .

  Jim Coan

  We come up with bullshit all the time. We're always lamenting in conference conversations about how, Well, our stimuli is not strong enough. This is a perfect idea.

  Nicole Prause

  We could kill it, potentially.

  Jim Coan

  You could kill it. And-

  Nicole Prause

  We're allowed to use vibrators on the genitals but not to bring them to orgasm. I'm not kidding. The crickets, the crickets.

  Jim Coan

  Well, I'm sort of...

  Nicole Prause

  This is how we felt too, when it got rejected. We were both just like, Well shit!

  Jim Coan

  So you took it up to higher levels. This is appalling. I mean, can I say that? I don't want to say that. You don't have to say anything bad about UCLA. But I'm appalled. And I can say that I find that appalling because I can imagine it happening in a lot of places. And because of this absurd, this infantilizing fear of sexuality. I mean, look, it's in me! The whole way, all through this whole conversation, I'm giggling like a junior high school kid like Beavis and Butthead. Because you know, it just- It creates this sort of nervous anxiety but what you're talking about makes perfect scientific sense.

  Nicole Prause

  Thank you, God dammit.

  Jim Coan

  You're welcome, God dammit. So okay, so we got that part of the story. It just went flashing by and I didn't want to let it go.

  Nicole Prause

  I know I hate to ruminate on that because it was so so sad at the time and just startling. I'd never, as many roadblocks as we have with sex, I'd never had one that hard. You know, just shit. An absolute no. So I can officially say you know, I used to make fun of us because I'd say Oh, we gripe all the time that we can't study here so we can't study that. We just never asked if we asked you know we're just being chicken shits about it. Let's be real and put in the protocol. So I did and I was like, Ah, shit, they were right. We can't do that here. You're not allowed.

  Jim Coan

  You got an answer.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. So...

  Jim Coan

  You did you end up doing that study at Pittsburgh?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, Pittsburgh had no problem with that.

  Jim Coan

  Good show Pittsburgh. We're proud of you. Proud of you, Pittsburgh.

  Nicole Prause

  So progressive. I love it.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny with a topic, like sexuality to- You know, one of the jokes you can make is , It's science! Ha ha ha, ha. Right? We're making people orgasm for science. But in actual fact, it's fucking science. That's what it is.

  Nicole Prause

  It is also fucking science. Fucking science!

  Jim Coan

  I know. I was hoping for that one.

  Nicole Prause

  You're welcome.

  Jim Coan

  Thank you. So how'd it go at Pittsburgh?

  Nicole Prause

  It was fascinating, frustrating, things happened that we had no idea we're going to happen, and have launched just in totally different directions than we ultimately anticipated. So we were surprised the pattern of stimulation we ended up picking worked for pretty much everyone who walked in the door. It's a relatively small sample, but men and women. Very pleased about that and shocked.

  Jim Coan

  So reliable results.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, we feel like we've got a pretty good stimulation pattern.

  Jim Coan

  Hard to come by in psychophysiology.

  Nicole Prause

  Oh, my God, hard to come by. And they just can't... I tried to let it go and...

  Jim Coan

  I've got others. I've others. I was making a list last night. There's some left.

  Nicole Prause

  That's what he said. So science, science. And yeah, so what were we- Oh! So some of the crazy stuff that happened, we found there's this funny kind of pattern. Like when people are initially getting sexually aroused. So early stage like, they're watching porn, or they're just the vibrator is about to come on kind of thing. You get two patterns. So we get strong Alpha suppression, and then we-

  Jim Coan

  Is it mostly frontal cortex?

  Nicole Prause

  Yes, it seems to be especially frontal. But in general, these are large effects.

  Jim Coan

  Their large effects. It's the fire hose-

  Nicole Prause

  We killed it. Yeah. And so we've got that starting off. And then the galvanic skin response, as you might expect, is going up. And then we have this funny thing happen. We say, Okay, thank you very much subject. You've been a great subject, we're now going to transition to the part where we'd like you to try and have an orgasm, if you can. No pressure, blah, blah, blah. And then alpha floats up and galvanic skin response drops. Throughout the cognitive shift to when we instruct them to change what they're trying to do. Up for the however long it takes, several minutes. So this is not like a blip just before. It appears to be a really long period before they have an orgasm, that we think is the first time we're aware of, someone has seen data of letting go. And what that means to shift into a state of mind where you can experience an orgasm

  Jim Coan

  It becomes, in a way, effortless. Because you know, when I think about the galvanic skin response for those listening, it's, you know, it's more or less how much you're sweating in your hands.

  Nicole Prause

  Supposedly the sympathetic nervous system.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah, sympathetic nervous system. And it's thought to be a measure of thought to be an index sort of general physiological arousal and effort.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, so you would think with orgasms it goes up, up, up, up, up.

  Jim Coan

  Just keep going.

  Nicole Prause

  Orgasm. Blammo. Thank you very much.

  Jim Coan

  Right. And then you'd see it return?

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah. Not so much. It turns out, in fact, the opposite. Oh, shit, we didn't know that. Now what?

  Jim Coan

  Well, that could cause a whole rethinking about the sexual response cycle.

  Nicole Prause

  It's funny, because there, in some ways, I think six therapists talk about this already. You know, they talked about getting in a brain state where you're not thinking about your grocery list. You know.

  Jim Coan

  And not thinking about your performance is the classic idea.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, or how fat your thighs look, or whatever distracting thing it is. But just having the experience, being in the moment.

  Jim Coan

  Having sex with a person or with yourself this case.

  Nicole Prause

  And we have some people studying mindfulness to help intervene with low drives. So that makes sense. If you're like catching the, you know, trying to stay with it.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  So to speak. But we didn't have a way of talking about this, because there had been like Sandy Messens lab, which is in Boston. He had this idea of exactly that it's this increase, they thought they documented that with having people ride a bicycle before they would watch a porno, and it would facilitate their response.

  Jim Coan

  Right.

  Nicole Prause

  So we thought this was great evidence that this is all part of the system. They just had to go up and up and up. Orgasm. And it turns out, Oh shit. Maybe we shouldn't measure that. That appears not to be the case. This may be important for experiencing high pleasure.

  Jim Coan

  So that's interesting. You learned something about orgasm per se.

  Nicole Prause

  Well, so there was that. But then we start asking around to other psycho physiologists. You know, have you ever seen- Have you looked at high levels of arousal, like at your highest in terms of galvanic skin response? And we weren't the only ones, but no one else published it because they thought it was like an artefactual problem. Like it wasn't real... So we have at least a couple of other instances of high emotional arousal, not sexual, where people think they've seen this already. So, I think it could inform kind of emotion processing more broadly. That is, how do you sustain pleasant affects, positive affect over time?

  Jim Coan

  And was this then implicated in your depression findings?

  Nicole Prause

  We don't have depression findings yet.

  Jim Coan

  Really? Okay, we're still waiting to hear about that.

  Nicole Prause

  We are just working on putting out this paper that has been invited for brain research in March. So that will be kind of first step. And now we're working on a project of orgasmic meditation, which is partner genital stimulation. So of course,

  Jim Coan

  Before we get there.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah.

  Jim Coan

  So I want to make sure that listeners know about your business. It's a foundation, it's a corporation.

  Nicole Prause

  LLC.

  Jim Coan

  It's an LLC. So it's like a for profit company?

  Nicole Prause

  For profit that's entirely funded by nonprofit grants.

  Jim Coan

  Is that because it was easy? Because it's easier to set up an LLC.

  Nicole Prause

  It's easier to set up. California has a lot of structural requirements for doing a nonprofit with all the tax benefits that come with that. So it was easier.

  Jim Coan

  And you set up this company, for what purpose?

  Nicole Prause

  To take in the two grants that were refused by the school to study orgasmic meditation.

  Jim Coan

  Okay. So we're back to what happened at UCLA.

  Nicole Prause

  I'm gonna be quiet.

  Jim Coan

  So you had this contract. It was just for a year.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, two years that ended up being just shy-

  Jim Coan

  You're still doing the depression study at Pittsburgh. So you've got that off the ground, and that's going with your pal Greg Segal.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah we're doing brain stimulation stuff here at UCLA with Marco.

  Jim Coan

  Marco Iaccoboni, the famous.

  Nicole Prause

  Indeed

  Jim Coan

  And why do you leave UCLA?

  Nicole Prause

  So normally, for those that don't know, if you're on a soft money contract like I was. You are eventually responsible for covering your own salary with grants.

  Jim Coan

  With grant money. But you have grants.

  Nicole Prause

  Yes, we got grants.

  Jim Coan

  And you got some sizable, decent grants.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, enough to cover my salary.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  At the level it was at and all that good stuff. So I kind of expected like normal that, Okay, it'll just be extended because that's pro forma.

  Jim Coan

  During my job at UCLA.

  Nicole Prause

  And I requested the account number a few times for to deposit the check, and they just weren't giving it to us. They weren't giving this very weird. And so eventually, I asked the funder, I said, Can you just- Would you mind sending me the check? And I'll see if like- If we just walk in with it, will he tell us, Oh, okay, here's where you put it. And that's when I got the official notice that they would not be accepting our grant funds. Which essentially is saying, buh bye. So.

  Jim Coan

  Had you spit on the director or had you set fire to something?

  Nicole Prause

  I think it has... It's difficult to say because they didn't make any attribution in the refusal of the funds. But this had come after a period of two things. One was the rejection of the orgasm study. Which was unusual, and certainly a problem.

  Jim Coan

  Okay.

  Nicole Prause

  And the other was because of the work I was doing, studying pornography addiction, they were getting almost weekly complaint letters asking me to be fired. Claiming I had falsified data and like.

  Jim Coan

  Did you falsify data?

  Nicole Prause

  I did not falsify data. Thank you for having me.

  Jim Coan

  I knew that. Wait, who was claiming you falsified data?

  Nicole Prause

  There's anti porn organizations. So people that want for example, porn to be taken off the internet, or they think porn is destroying marriages, and-

  Jim Coan

  But what does that have to do with the work that you're doing?

  Nicole Prause

  We had found evidence in the largest neuroscience studies still to date that porn did not look like other substance or behavioral addictions. It was different in a very distinct way so that you really shouldn't be calling it an addiction, probably. You know, that it's clearly a problem for some people, but it doesn't look like an addiction.

  Jim Coan

  So the theory, the dominant sort of folk theory was that porn is addicting in the same kind of fashion that

  Nicole Prause

  Cocaine...

  Jim Coan

  Cocaine are. Right. Right. And you found evidence that that was not necessarily a strong...

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, our team-

  Jim Coan

  Or at least strong evidence for that

  Nicole Prause

  Had a couple of publications in this area, and then some behavioral publications. And this angered them to no end. Because they'd started calling it an addiction before there had been a single experimental study.

  Jim Coan

  Oh, for God's sake. So are they still after you?

  Nicole Prause

  Oh, yeah. Every day. Every day. So it was a kind of transitioning to the company with a combination of those things I think. That is, the school was having to deal a lot with these complaints that you know, they were-

  Jim Coan

  They should have come to bat for you.

  Nicole Prause

  They did actually. Like they had a lot of attorney time because as a public university have to respond to complaints like that. And so they would have to investigate every single thing these yahoos sent in. They'd come to me, Did you do this? No. Thank you.

  Jim Coan

  Did you have to get formal investigations about data falsification and all of those things?

  Nicole Prause

  No, they actually never did that because they didn't actually present any things to suggest. They just thought it had definitely been falsified. It had to have been falisfied.

  Jim Coan

  For God's sake. Forget it.

  Nicole Prause

  And the school is like No, not unless you have real reason to think so. So.

  Jim Coan

  Well, so now you were able to move the grants over to the business. What's the business called?

  Nicole Prause

  Liberos.

  Jim Coan

  Liberos.

  Nicole Prause

  Yeah, this is Mark Cohen's baby, actually. We were trying to come up with a name so libre and eros. Freedom to desire.

  Jim Coan

  I love it. Freedom to desire.

  Nicole Prause

  You don't have to desire if you don't want to. But if you do.

  Jim Coan

  If you do. And you've moved the grants over to the... The other grants are for studying orgasm...

  Nicole Prause

  Orgasmic meditation.

  Jim Coan

  Orgasmic meditation. And it's ongoing.

  Nicole Prause

  We are collecting data as we speak.

  Jim Coan

  So can I just make an observation? First of all, I want to say I really admire what you're doing, because you've had so many opportunities, let's say, to just say, Fuck it, I'm not going to do this anymore. Because it's really hard. You're up against a culture. And God, you've been up against this since your childhood in Beaumont. That just doesn't want it- You know, it reminds me a little bit of what Ellen Berscheid went through in the late 70s. When Proxmire, Senator Proxmire established the Golden Fleece award, because she wanted to study love. And at that time, that was a horrible, taboo. You couldn't study love. Love is a great mystery, you know? There's no biology of love, you know, that. And he said famously, that even if there was he wouldn't want to know about it. And I think that, you know, psychologies come through, you know, sort of the psychodynamic, behaviorism, the cognitive revolution, but then studying emotions was all sort of like, that's not real science. And now it's a very firm part of the science. Sort of the body of science that we have than the study of relationships at all. And that all focused on romance.

  Nicole Prause

  So mushy.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah, and now it's much more established. And we even have neuroscience every now and then. And sex is still...

  Nicole Prause

  The last frontier.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah, kind of. Even though you've had Masters and Johnson and they did really important work. And you had Kinsey. And obviously, you've had- There are other researchers in the world doing sex research. But what you're really illustrating is how far we have left to go.

  Nicole Prause

  But this is part of the attraction. I mean, seriously, when we saw that pattern with orgasm, you know, mind blown.

  Jim Coan

  You're a real discovery.

  Nicole Prause

  You just discovered something about basic physiology. Whoah!

  Jim Coan

  Yeah, that's good.

  Nicole Prause

  That is cool! Like, what other fields is that open? You know that it's gonna be something brand new, you didn't know the body worked that way.

  Jim Coan

  Well, I tell you, it's really great stuff. And I really appreciate your taking the time to talk with me about this great work. We're gonna do this again. Because I have so much more to talk with you about.

  Nicole Prause

  Oh, good, another pervert. I like it.

  Jim Coan

  Yeah.

  Nicole Prause

  I'm in.

  Jim Coan

  All right. Thank you so much.

  Jim Coan

  Okay, that's it. Very many thanks to Nicole Prause for her candor and wit, and scientific rigor. And for putting up with me. I just couldn't stop laughing and I do apologize for that. But hey, you know what? The important thing is, as uncomfortable as things can get when discussing how to make people orgasm, or you know, what happens to the sexual response when you drink or really anything, whatever having to do with pornography, say. The important thing is we keep talking, right? We keep talking about it. Just let it be uncomfortable until it isn't anymore. Because if we resolve to stop avoiding our discomfort, we may well decide to devote more resources to this vital research. By doing that, might even learn some more stuff about the psychology and physiology of sex. And maybe that stuff will be stuff we can leverage to increase our health and well being. You never know. I have a feeling that would be the case. Anyway, thanks again, Nikki, for the conversation and for all the work you are doing. Folks, the music on Circle of Willis is written by Tom Stoffer and Jean Ruli and performed by their band the New Drake's. For information about how to purchase their music, check the about page at Circle of Willis podcast.com. Don't forget that Circle of Willis is brought to you by VQR and the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. And that Circle of Willis is a member of the TEEJFM network. You can find out more about that at TEEJ dot F M. If you liked this podcast, how about giving us a little review at iTunes and letting us know how we're doing. It's super easy, and we like it, or send us an email by going to Circle of Willis podcast.com and clicking on the contact tab. In any case, I'll see you at episode 12 where I talked with Jay Van Bavel, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at New York University. Jay and I cover a lot of great round on the use of social media to communicate about politics and science, to the psychology of group identity, and even to some of his adventures as a kid who grew up in pretty rural northern Alberta. That's in Canada folks. Okay, until then, bye bye.