The Woman Who Could Think Herself Off

When Traci's hand rises up from under the white hospital blanket, one of the scientists spots it and calls out, "Orgasm!"

This is completely unexpected for many reasons. Traci is waist deep in an MRI machine at the Center for Advanced Imaging at Rutgers-Newark University. The room is cold. She's encased in a kind of high-tech plastic hockey mask that helps center the MRI's magnetic scan. She's already been in the MRI machine for almost an hour as researchers map the parts of her brain that light up when she thinks about her toes and fingers, and also the parts that light up when they touch her toes and fingers with a dull plastic knife. She's wearing earplugs and headphones, and her head is wrapped with memory foam to keep it as still as possible, a technique Dr. Barry Komisaruk—­distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers and lead author of the definitive scholarly study The Science of Orgasm—finds more workable than making his volunteers clamp their teeth on a fixed bar. On top of that, a group of complete strangers is watching her every move through a big glass window: the lab technician in his white coat, the Ph.D. candidate making notes in her loose-leaf binder, the reporter with his tape recorder, the undergraduate research assistant who just announced an intense craving for cashews.

But here's the biggest reason Traci's orgasm is a surprise: There was no apparent cause—or at least no physical cause. She was merely thinking.

Komisaruk leans toward the microphone. At 68, with a balding dome ringed by professorial tufts of hair, he has a gentle and fatherly manner. "You had an orgasm, Traci?"

"A little bit."

"Just right toward the end, right?"

"Yeah."

"Were you thinking of tapping your clitoris yourself or having it tapped by someone else?" (Tapping is Komisaruk's attempt at a neutral alternative to words like caressing.)

She laughs. "I don't know."

"Okay, that's fine. Nonspecific."

He nods to the Ph.D. candidate, who has been tracking the movement of Traci's signaling hand in 10-minute increments and charting each signal to the exact minute and second. She makes a note on her clipboard that the orgasm lasted for the final eight seconds of this 10-minute session.

"I'd say six seconds or so," says the research assistant.

"But she had a thinking orgasm," Komisaruk says, smiling.

Says the Ph.D. candidate, visibly impressed, "She sure did."

These are exciting times in the study of excitement. Not long ago John Steinbeck could  say the typical American man knew "more about the Ford coil than the clitoris." Now, recent advances in brain imaging are helping scientists draw the schematic that links the clitoris to the biggest sex organ of all: the brain.

Komisaruk is at the forefront of that research. Born and raised in the Bronx, the son of Eastern European immigrants who ran a humble Harlem pharmacy, he received a doctorate in neuroscience at Rutgers and began his career studying the pleasure centers of rats at UCLA's Brain Research Institute.

When he became a professor at Rutgers, Komisaruk noticed an odd thing: Horny rats don't appear to feel pain. He decided to see if the same was true of horny humans—but he ran into fierce resistance from opponents who thought that kind of research would damage the university's reputation. About the same time , in 1982, Komisaruk's wife died from cancer. "It was a very, very difficult year," he remembers. "She was in the hospital in terrible pain, and I felt like a dummy just standing there not being able to do anything for her."

Freshly determined to make pain relief his mission, Komisaruk finally received the university's permission and began the first series of human tests to explore the neurology of orgasm. Working with a grad student named Beverly Whipple (now one of the world's foremost researchers on the science of sex), he quickly established that vaginal stimulation in women increased pain thresholds by 50 percent.

Orgasm was the ultimate painkiller, raising the threshold to 100 percent—but not for men. Despite the powerful effect orgasm had on women, it had no effect on male pain. Komisaruk and Whipple learned this was because male orgasm is carried exclusively through the pudendal nerve

“  At the level of brain chemistry, women really do feel a connection between love and sex.  ”

(which doesn't carry inhibitors for pain), while female orgasm also travels through the pelvic nerve (which does). They even discovered that a specific peptide produced by the pelvic nerve creates the pain-blocking effect, which Komisaruk was able to simplify and patent. Then he began focusing on orgasms in women with spinal cord injuries. Since their pudendal nerves were usually severed, these women provided him a clear picture of which nerve pathways sexual information rides on its way to the female brain.

With the data from this research, Komisaruk was able to produce the first detailed map of the female sexual response system, proof of what folk wisdom has said all along: Men are simple, and women are freakin' complicated. "We now know there are three different nerves, each of which can by itself activate an orgasm in women," he says. "We also know that the more nerves that are stimulated, the more complex and intense th379e orgasm becomes. Clitoral seems more external and localized, and vaginal or cervical feels deeper and incorporates the whole body. In other words, they're additive."

The final step was to chart the stimulated parts of the brain with brain scan imagery, a technique that became available only five years ago. The orgasm centers turned out to be the nucleus accumbens (which also plays a role in laughter, addiction and fear), the amygdala (which tells the adrenal gland to produce adrenaline), the insular cortex (which translates sensations into emotions such as happiness and disgust) and the hypothalamic region (which plays an important role in childbirth and produces the mysterious hormone ocytocin). Again, all the evidence confirmed folk wisdom: At the level of brain chemistry, women really do feel a connection between love and sex.