Instant Genius - The science of Intimacy, with Dr Michelle Drouin

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

Psychologist Dr Michelle Drouin, author of Out of Touch: How to Survive an Intimacy Famine, explains why intimacy, both physical and emotional, is essential for our mental health. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. From BBC Science Focus magazine, this is Instant Genius, a bite-sized mask class in podcast form. I'm Amy Barrett, editorial assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. This week, I'm talking to Dr. Michelle Drouin. She's a professor of psychology and the author of Out of Touch, How to Survive an Intimacy Famine. She tells me all about why intimacy, both physical and emotional, is essential for our mental health. What counts as intimacy? Lots of things count as intimacy. I think when someone thinks about intimacy, their minds automatically go to sex or other types of physical

touch, but the physical part of intimacy is only one part. There is also. There is also, So intellectual intimacy, you know, the challenging ideas that we share with others or our intellectual exploration that we do with others. There's spiritual intimacy. There's emotional intimacy. So the physical intimacy that people think about is just, again, only one facet of what I see is an entire rainbow of intimate moments that we can have as human beings in our life. So could anything be intimate? That's a good question. I guess if it feels, intimate to you, then it could be. You know, you and I could be talking about zucchini. And if I found that

to be an intimate topic, then yeah, I mean, anything could be intimate, any touch, any conversation. And I think one of the unique things about it is that it's, you know, from the perception of the person who's having the intimate moment. So, you know, you and I could be in a conversation that I feel is really intimate, but you could walk away and feel like, eh, that was just an everyday a conversation with a person who I consider an acquaintance. So what is the difference between your experience and mine? What's actually happening that gives you that intimate feeling within your body? I think that there's probably not a lot of research on that.

I didn't certainly cover any in my book, but I think, you know, perception is reality. So if I feel something that's similar to something I felt before, that probably would make it feel quite intimate. So if I think about, I'll go to a physical touch, you know, holding someone's hand, that might be something that triggers in my mind memories of times when I've held someone's hand before, which is something that feels quite intimate to me. You know, we have in our minds these, I call them file cabinets, but schemes of our experiences of people and places and things.

And we store all of those experiences in someone. places in our memory. So we have basically these organized ways to interpret our experiences. So I think anything that triggers a positive feeling based on something you've experienced before would likely then feel like an intimate moment for you. And you mentioned a couple of different types. So for example, how important would physical intimacy be compared with something like emotional intimacy or is there, you know, do we have to have a mix of several, different types in order to feel kind of, I don't know, fulfilled with our intimacy? That's a great question. Again, I don't think that the science has made any kind of determining

opinion on that. What I will say is that even people who feel really emotionally fulfilled in a relationship, if they're missing that physical intimacy aspect of their relationship, they feel sometimes that vacancy in their lives, so much so that, as I mentioned, in my book, you know, millions of people have watched a talk on the sexless marriage. It's a TEDx talk. And when you look for sexless marriage, it actually, if you look at Google Trends, has more hits than things like cheating in a relationship. Cheating in a relationship infidelity is really common. But if you put those or pit those experiences against each other by looking at Google Trends, more people are looking up sexless marriage. So,

you know, again, this is all in the mind of the person who's having the experience. Some people might not have any physical intimacy in their lives and have a lot of emotional intimacy and they feel completely fulfilled. Others might really need that physical intimacy. So it all depends on your personal construct for what is a full life to, you know, feel whether or not each of those things is important to you. And is there some impact that these different types of intimacy have on our bodies? Say, like, is there any kind of biological changes that happen when we hug someone? Yes, there definitely are. So I always say hug people for at least 20 seconds because that's when all of the feel good neurotransmitters will hit us. Even if you hug a pet for 20 seconds,

it has a really good effect on the body. So it can lower, you. your blood pressure even to be in a hug. It's good for us cardiovascularly to have sex with others. It's probably some sex with ourselves as well. It's good for our brains. It releases a lot of feel-good hormones. So, yeah, I mean, physical touch has profound effects on the body. And there's even a lot of research that shows that a hug can make you more resilient against illness. You know, people who have hugs as part of their daily lives. They can resist in these experimental scenarios. They put everyone in a hotel. They expose them to these nasal sprays that have viruses in them. And the people who had more hugs in the previous week are less likely to even get sick. So it gives your body even resilience. It boosts

your immunity. Yeah. So there are a cascade of positive changes that happen in the body when we have physical touch that are really supported by science. You mentioned some of the hormones there. Can you tell me a bit more about that kind of the hormonal element of these things? So oxytocin is one that a lot of people focus on. It's this bonding hormone that you often hear associated with mothers and their infants. And although there's been some debate, I think, in recent years about whether or not these acts really do flood you with oxytocin, certainly there's some. something about sex that seems to be related to bonding in this oxytocin. They actually say that

after having sex for about 48 hours, you have this window where you actually feel a little closer to your partner, which is a really interesting scientific finding. But what they're saying then is that's the reason why sex might be of value to people in a relationship. Sure, it feels good. And sure, there are these social prescriptions that say that we should be having sex as part of a good relationship. And that's putting, I think, pressure on people. But also biologically, there is something happening when people have sex that actually feels good in their bodies and is promoting this bonding with their partner or further bonding with their partner. Additionally, you know, we have these dopamine feedback loops that, you know, happen in our brains so that when we get stimulation,

we might then get more, you know, a dopamine release that's going to put us in this anticipation mode and then we'll have the all of this firing. And then we'll eventually get doled again, the more that we've had that, whatever that stimulus is. So let's say it's touch. I'm going to have this really intense anticipation phase. I'm going to have while I'm being touched, you know, all of these neurons firing. And then afterwards, I'm going to get dulled to the experience someone. but it can be reawakened again so that I feel that intense anticipation again. So it's almost like a slot machine in your brain or some type of lottery that's happening where you feel like there's this big payout.

So I think dopamine and oxytocin are the main two neurotransmitters and hormones that people think of when they're talking about the positive effects of physical touch. And you mentioned the kind of the bonding, the maternal or parental bonding that happens. How key is it? And what sort of ages are we looking at when we say, you know, kids really do need to have those elements of physical touch and intimacy? Well, Renee Spitz did research a long time ago when he had gone into a founding home. And I actually talk a little bit about this in my book. What they had done is followed children whose mothers were in prison. And some of them in this prison atmosphere,

these children were allowed to be with their mothers. And then they also looked at children who were in what was termed a foundling home. So this is basically an orphanage for children who didn't have parents. And although the two conditions were pretty similar in terms of their sanitation, you know, their nutrition, the, you know, how the children, the environments generally, how the children were, you know, kept in these little worlds, the children in the foundling home were more likely to die, especially within the first nine months of life. And they were so much better developmentally than the kids who are having contact with their mothers who were in the prison.

And they really found that the main difference was that the kids who were in the prison atmosphere had contact with a single caregiver. So I mentioned mothers, but it doesn't have to be a mother. Like it can be any caregiver that's giving physical attention, intimate moments, just attention generally to a child. And that seems to be a critical thing to not only promote bonding, but actually even help kids thrive, especially in those early years. So, you know, the first year is really important. I know that if children don't get that bonding with any primary caregiver, it can actually set a course for their entire lives where they're

not really able to bond with anyone. So it can also be a real problematic thing if they are not able to bond with a single caregiver. Can you kind of make up for lost time by having, you know, lots of physical touch or indeed lots of emotional or mental intimacy to make up for a childhood without it? That's a great question. So there does seem to be, like I said, a sensitive period during which you should be having those experiences. We have what's called these working models of attachment. Our bonds with our early caregivers give us a model for how all future attachments should be. And those models tend to be pretty stable. So if I learn as a child that I can't trust my world, then it makes me not trusting of others as I go forward in relationships. But can they be changed?

I mean, I'm optimistic that they can. On average, I'm not sure that they do so much. Sometimes those early experiences, especially for kids who've been neglected or abused, they set course for really challenging time in developing close interpersonal relationships. That said, let's talk about just us as adults. If we have a bad relationship experience, if we had a childhood where we didn't have a lot of physical affection, but we are not opposed to that in our lives. We can set course and change the direction that we have regarding intimacy and affection in our lives. So I don't think it's ever too

late. It's just that we might not be attracted to those kinds of experiences based on our early models. Speaking of when, you know, we're adults, assuming that I, in my childhood, I still did get, I got a good amount of physical touch and another intimacy for me. If I'm a single adult living alone and have been for a while and likely to stay that way, should I be concerned about my lack of intimacy? Only if you feel a lack of intimacy. I mean, one strong thing that we know from psychological literature is that problems are not usually problems until they start affecting your everyday life.

So that should be your barometer for whether or not it's a problem. is it affecting your everyday life? Are you depressed? Are you anxious? Are you incredibly lonely? Do you feel socially isolated? If those are true for you, then it probably is something that you should address. But otherwise, no. I mean, people can be completely happy living asexual lives where they don't have any touch. Again, it's all someone's perspective. And in terms of kind of trends of society on our larger scale, are you finding that we are becoming more or less intimate? So there are trends that point to the idea that we are not bonding in ways that maybe I would have considered bonding 30 years ago. So let's talk about trends in marriage. Fewer people are married,

more people are single, more people are divorcing. There are a lot of reasons why we have more single people than we ever have. So that in general is not anything that's negative. There does seem to be some positive for men specifically who are married in terms of a lot of their health indicators. I also know it's really good to have very close contacts. Having good friends is something that's a predictor of longevity, having a happy life. Having close friends is really important. So those types of intimacy appear to be something that's positive. Now, the idea that we have fewer people getting married is that prohibiting any physical intimacy? Is that prohibiting emotional intimacy? I'm going to say maybe because people who are married are more often having sex than people who are single.

And sex is a type of intimacy. And I don't know if you saw the media headlines, but I was asked about it a couple of years ago. They were asking me about these trends. that we've seen, and I discussed this in my book, in millennials having less sex. So millennials are having less sex than people of previous generations at that time. And when I was asked about it, I thought, yes, there's probably fewer committed relationships among these groups of people. And because of that, you just have fewer opportunities to have sexual relationships. And that's it. even though you have kind of a tinder culture where you think everyone is out having sex with everyone when they're single, that's not really true. Pretty much regardless of the age group we look at,

people who are uncommitted relationships are having more sex. So yes, there is a trend for lower levels of intimacy. It's related to a lot of different things. And going back to what I was saying before about the shape of intimacy, when I look at my children's lives compared to my life, what I would say is, their intimate experiences are somewhat different. Whereas I used to spend an hour talking on a landline with a friend. They are, I have two teenage boys. So they are often communicating with their friends while they're playing some type of online game through a Discord app, through headphones and a microphone. And although that's a different type of intimate experience than what I had when I was a child, I just don't know if that's less intimate. I do liken it. Just recently,

I was thinking about if life is a pool and your daily experience is its cover, what I think my children are doing is they're throwing marbles on that cover. And all of those marbles kind of stay on the surface. None of them really penetrate deeply. Whereas when I was young, I was throwing bowling balls on that cover. I was going out with my friends. We were having, you know, we were riding bikes around the town and we were having, I think, deep experiences that really penetrated me. But there's no science that backs up that these are less intimate, especially to the people who are experiencing them because their spectrum or continuum of intimacy is different. And I guess, you know, throughout the pandemic, a lot of us have had to turn to these kind of different digital, virtual

ways of connecting with others. So I guess, you know, it is quite fresh in our minds. Is there any kind of literature out there that can tell us the differences between these virtual experiences and real life kind of physical touch or physical intimacy? Not necessarily physical intimacy. I recently completed a study that I don't talk about in my book. But in that study, I had people communicate with either this AI robot replica that I do talk about in my book, or they had a conversation with a human face-to-face or they had a conversation with a human via instant messaging. And this was all framed as a getting-to-know-you experience. So these were people that they did not know. They were meeting strangers, including replica, that people did not know. And I wanted to see what their

enjoyment was like of these conversations. And what I found was that overall people were happy talking to either replica, text messaging, or having a face-to-face conversation. But they did feel closer bonds and they wanted to spend more time with the person who they met with face to face. And in both of those human conditions, they favored that over the robot or the AI condition. With the AI condition, though, something that was interesting is they felt fewer negative evaluation concerns. So they weren't as concerned that they were being judged. So there's some beauty in that and that, you know, the presence of an AI friend means that you may have a non-judgment, party who can be witness to your life, who could be positive and supportive. And I think that that's

something that's, you know, in the future will be interesting to explore. But in terms of directly contrasting, you know, an intimate conversation you might have via text message with physical touch, we don't have those comparisons yet. I do know that, as I said before, there are these cascades of, you know, floods of neurotransmitters that happen when you have physical touch. So for me, that is something that may be not able to be compared to those intimate experiences that you're having emotionally. You do talk about the kind of the AI in the book and it's really fascinating to hear kind of from an insider's perspective as to what goes into making these, these kind of human like robots. But I'm wondering, do you know if the physical touch that they would give,

do you know, do you know if they could be a hand on the shoulder or a hug to people who don't have a human to do that with? I absolutely see that as the future of robotics. I think that that is one of the things I'm most excited about. At the end of the book, I talk about my grandmother who was in a nursing home for the end of her life. She didn't have much contact with almost anyone. She lived for so long in the nursing home that nearly everyone she knew had died. The average person lives about two years in a nursing home, and the nurse's age changed quite frequently. It's actually the turnover rate in that type of skilled nursing care is very, very high. So my grandmother, who was blind at the end of her life, she would just spend most of her days listening to books on tape

that my aunt got for her from the library. And when I met Sophia, which I talk about in my book, my first thought and the most impactful part of that experience was thinking about how a social robot like Sophia could have been comfort to my grandmother, not only as an intellectual partner or a social partner, but also as a physical partner, someone who could have put a hand on her hand and a hand on her shoulder, who could have kissed her on the forehead at night and said, I care about you, I love you, anything. I think it could have been really meaningful for my grandmother. So yes, I see that future. Regarding the animatronics of it, I think we're nearly there. We have really gotten anthropomorphism right, certainly with Sophia, her face.

feels like a face. If we can replicate that throughout the body, I think we're probably a lot closer than people think to having very lifelike robots. Really? Will it be, you know, are we talking years, decades, lifetimes? I wish I could anticipate that. The one thing that I know is that the AI is not at the place it needs to be. You know, right now AI is not at the deep level. It needs to be for these robots to really think on their own. The conversations that they have are not completely stilted, but there are times when you can trip up the current AI. What I think we're going to need that advancing at the same time

as we have the anthropomorphism, you know, the animatronic aspect advancing. So what we really need are two different things that are both advancing at the same time. I don't know. I'm guessing it's going to be decades. I'd be excited to see it in my lifetime, but I'm not sure that that's going to happen. So I am not, and I need to put this caveat out there, I am not a robotics researcher. I'm fascinated with robotics and AI, and I'm keeping tabs on what's happening, but I am certainly not able to make predictions on the trends. I think though that even the movement we've made in the past decade has been amazing. And in terms of, I mean, you've touched on this slightly, but the public health impact of, you know, the amount of intimacy that a society is guessing in general, what actually is that impact on our public health?

AI. Oh, gosh, the impact of AI on public health could be grand. Let's take it smaller first. What is the impact of technology on public health? health. One of the things that we looked at at the hospital. So one of my jobs, and I again, talk about this in my book, is that I work in a research and innovation center for a hospital. So it's been great because any new innovations or trends that come into the hospital, we can study. And we have this giant patient population. We have 11 hospitals, thousands of patients, thousands of workers. And it's been amazing to be able to be at the forefront of technological innovation in a healthcare setting. So one of the foci of our research lab is looking at, for example, the remote monitoring of cardiac devices, so implantable cardiac devices, something I would have never thought I'd have been researching

five years ago, but it actually dovetails nicely with my current research interest. But to think about how we're able to monitor health conditions from afar with these devices that are implanted within people. The strides we're making with things like diabetes, you know, where these remote monitors can actually sense changes in the body, give alerts to an individual through a mobile phone. You know, these are the things we currently have. I envision a future where we have, you know, nanobot surgery, where we could maybe have these very small things entering the body, robotic tools that will go in and do these major repairs where right now we need to do some very invasive surgeries that are difficult on the body, hard to recover from costly, both from

an economic perspective, but also from a time, a physical health, a personal energy perspective. So in terms of health, physical health, I see wonderful things. In a part of our research, though, and I'll touch on the second, we were looking at how people use social media during the first part of the pandemic for coping. And what we found is that people who had already anxious thoughts and maybe baseline levels of clinical anxiety, those fears were actually exacerbated with the more time they were spending online monitoring what was happening. So there are also ways that the messages that we're getting through social media, through the news, can actually shape public health behaviors and reactions to crises like the pandemic.

So there are ways that technology is infiltrating our public health every single day. It's dripping. It's dripping in these small ways in terms of influencing our attitudes, influencing even the anxiety we feel. about any kind of event. But it's also drenching us when we have these really innovative technological, you know, trends that change the shape of medicine. And it's something that I think a lot of media

will tend to kind of latch on to this idea that, you know, the social media that we consume or screen time is, you know, to blame for, like that study you were talking about with, you know, millennials having less sex. I think a lot of that gets pinned on increased screen time and increased social media. Is there the evidence to kind of back that kind of claim up? No, not directly. What I think, and I did say this when asked about this originally five years ago, the internet's role might be mediating one in that maybe we're coupling up less because the internet gives us so many choices. One, aside from having a partner,

people can be very happy without partners. I can go online and I can read, you know, my Kindle, I can, we are naturally infovores as humans. We love information. And so the internet is a cornucopia of information. So instead of having a person next to me who I can be talking to, I can find lots of things online to read that can stimulate me intellectually. I can have conversations with others. I can find groups. I'm in a Haruki Murakami group on Facebook. I'm fascinated that there are these people all over the world who will take these snippets

of his pieces and then they'll talk about them and, you know, I'll read their comments and I'll read why they fell in love with Murakami and what particular passages inspired them. And I'm communicating with people. And if I wanted to, I could dive deeper into that community. I'm also part of a Gustav Klimt one. So I also love to see, you know, what people liked about the paintings. Anyway, there are a lot of alternatives online to having a physical partner here. So that's one of the things that might be distracting us away from having physical intimacy because I am, I can actually find a lot of intimacy just through my phone. There's an additional thing, which is relationships, which used to be quite, I guess, small in supply. When you think back 100 years ago, my options for finding people might be limited to the people who were in my physical environment, you know, people who lived down the street for me, people who I met when I went to church or when I went to school.

Now the world is wide open. I could meet anyone in the entire world as long as they're. I have an internet connection. So I think that idea of so many fish being in the sea might be dissuading people away from committed relationships. And when there's a bump in the road, it might also be convincing people, hey, I don't need to stay here. There's no reason for me to get over this bump.

Instead, I can just look elsewhere because there are lots of people. And that's true. There are so many people in this world that you could probably be happy with. In fact, in the book, I say, you are probably, you probably have on this earth so many compatible partners that you could go on a date every night for the rest of your life and not meet all of them. Wow. That sounds exhausting. I agree.

Can you imagine going on a date everything for the rest of your life? But I think dating right now is exhausting because even if you're not choosing to go on a date every day for the rest of your life, the possibility if you really exhaust all of your online options and as well supplement them with your offline options, you probably could. If someone listening felt like they wanted to kind of get more intimacy points within their day or within their week or life, if they were going to make sort of three changes, what would those three changes to their lifestyle be so that they could get some more intimacy? Oh, that's a great question.

The first change I'm going to say is to make intentional choices about how you spend your time. One of the ideas that I've really grabbed onto lately is this idea of social economizing. We have choices about the way we spend our time. Apparently, the average American, so I'm sorry, I don't know the British statistics, but the average American as of 2020 had 5.5 hours of leisure time each day. That's actually an increase of about 37 or 39 minutes from 2019 because fewer people are traveling and fewer people are working. So I would guess that the British statistics are probably quite similar. If you think that you have 5.5 hours of leisure time each day, think about how you're filling that time.

What are the moments that you are inserting into that? I can tell you that few people are doing the things that I think could really invite intimacy in their lives as compared to the things that aren't. So in America, for example, people are spending on average a 2.5 hours watching television. The people who watch television more are less likely to be happy. It's actually associated with negative outcomes in terms of health and well-being, the more TV you watch. If you watch less than 30 minutes per day, it's usually fine. Those people fare better. But you spend more than twice the time watching television than you do exercising, thinking, or relaxing, and socializing with others combined.

If you combined all three of those. So my first recommendation would be to prioritize your time. People say they don't have time, but it's just simply not true. They do have time. They're just prioritizing in a different way. The second thing I would suggest is that if you want to have more specifically physical intimacy, which is something that a lot of people say is missing in their lives, then I think you need to make changes to your life that will help you align those moments. Let's take a married couple. One of the studies that I did with a co-author Brandon McDaniel, who's a family science researcher. we found that a lot of people don't go to bed together. Going to bed together, which is a time in a day where you have ideal moments for intimacy, it's such a missed opportunity for a lot of couples. And this is not necessarily people who are working swing shift and don't see their partners because of that. These are just normal couples who when they describe their typical bedtime,

time they say, oh, I watch TV on the couch. She goes to bed early. By the time I go in, she's already sleeping, or we go to bed together. We're both on our phones. We don't touch. We don't talk. They are wasting, I think, what could be really valuable moments in a leisure time, you know, in your leisure time. So if you want that physical intimacy, prioritize it. I guess this is very similar to the social economizing I said the first time, but specifically make decisions before that are going to lead to opportunities to have that type of intimacy. Finally, I would suggest to people that they need to kind of evaluate whether they have, going back to the conversation that we talked about before, any hang-ups about intimacy.

What are their experiences that they had that shaped them that made them more or less likely to want to have physical intimacy in their lives? or more or less likely to want to have emotional intimacy. We haven't talked about that, but people with insecure attachment patterns, they don't want to depend on other people or on the other side. They want to depend too much on people. They're not comfortable with other people depending on them or for them depending on other people. So sorting through your views of relationships and what they're supposed to bring to you,

whether you're someone who thinks I absolutely need a partner in order to be happy, or if you're someone who thinks I need no one in this life. Sorting through that might help you set a track for intimacy that satisfies your own needs. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Dr. Michelle Drewitt. If you want to know more about the science of intimacy, check out her book, Out of Touch. Or to hear her tell me more about how we can get more intimacy in our daily lives, head over to Instant Genius Extra, available only on Apple Podcasts.

The January issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a coffee in store or visit sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship. So you can listen to music, just as the artist intended.

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