The Science of Yoga

sang. The novice yogis told of improvements in all categories of sexual experience under investigation—including desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction. The men, age forty on average, reported enhanced abilities to maintain an erection during intercourse and increases in their degree of hardness. They also expressed greater confidence.
    The women told of newfound excitement. Their ages ranged from twenty-two to fifty-five. As a group, they reported improvements across all measured categories, including several indicators of heightened pleasure as well as emotional closeness with lovers. The scientists also found that women at different life stages differed in what they considered the best results. Women over forty-five reported that the biggest gains centered on enhanced arousal. In contrast, the younger women reported that the largest improvements had to do with the quality of their orgasms.
    The natural history of the human orgasm is a subject on which science has shed some light. Over the decades, teams of investigators have measured its length and discerned a well-defined experience that can vary considerably in duration and character. The usual range falls between a few seconds and twenty-two seconds. Masters and Johnson discovered that, in rare instances, certain women could experience orgasms that lasted a minute or more. They coined a fancy term for the situation, calling it status orgasmus. The status implied a continuous state rather than brief interlude. The scientists found that women experiencing such episodes appeared to move with extreme rapidity between successive orgasmic peaks, as indicated by repeated contractions of their vaginal walls. The measurements of one woman showed her undergoing more than two dozen rapid contractions.
    Not surprisingly, the nervous system turned out to orchestrate the arousals. The most important shift featured the change from parasympathetic to sympathetic dominance. The parasympathetic—the rest and digest part—beganthe activity by promoting a state of relaxed engorgement and erection. In this phase, the reproductive organs of both males and females filled with blood. Then the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system would kick in, pumping adrenaline and throwing the body into a rising frenzy of tension, breathing, and pounding activity, as well as soaring heart rates and blood pressure. The sympathetic peak came at climax.
    In exploring this world, science found a remarkable class of women who can think themselves into states of sexual ecstasy—a phenomenon known clinically as spontaneous orgasm and popularly as thinking off. At Rutgers University, scientists looked at ten women who claimed such abilities. Each was examined separately. In the laboratory, the scientists would have each woman lie down on a hospital bed full of decorative pillows, measure her excitement, and compare her response to readings generated when she stimulated her genitals manually.
    The results were unambiguous. The scientists found that both conditions produced significant rises in blood pressure, heart rate, and pupil dilation (all due to sympathetic arousal) as well as tolerance for pain—what turns out to be a signature of orgasm. Some of the women, the scientists noted, “showed vigorous muscular movement” during their nongenital arousals while others “appeared to be lying still.” The overall findings, the team wrote in a 1992 paper, called for “a reassessment of the nature of orgasm.”
    Significantly, yoga played a central role in developing some of these talents. One of the women was a yogini who was happy to demonstrate her abilities for the sake of science. She said she could focus on her spinal column and rapidly throw its energies into action. “Just tell me which chakra you’d like to measure,” she told the scientist in charge. “I can orgasm up and down all the energy centers. I don’t know how much time you’ve got, but I won’t have any problem keeping things going all afternoon.”
    At first glance, the idea of experiencing sexual bliss over the course of hours, days, or a lifetime seems absurd. If regular orgasms involve the fleeting loss of contact with reality (what is sometimes known as la petite mort , “the little death”), then a rapturous experience that went on continuously would seem to leave its beneficiaries cut off from the world and permanently adrift.How would you eat, play soccer, or run a meeting? The idea of existing in