The Hidden Power of Physical Connection
Jim Coan is a Professor of Clinical Psychology and the Director of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Virginia. His research on handholding emphasizes the neuroscience of emotion and social relationships, and he has authored over 50 scientific articles. He is a recipient of the inaugural Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science and the Early Career Award from the Society for Psychophysiological Research.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Jim Coan defines physical connection and the physiological effect on your body
How does touch influence cognitive development?
Types of physical touch activities to strengthen relationships
Jim talks about different ways to merge marital communication with physical touch
Jim discusses his research on the cognitive process of physical communication
The power behind handholding on physical and mental health
Can you experience a physiological response through hearing a voice?
In this episode…
When the trials and distractions of life get in the way, how can physical touch make a difference? How can you can improve your marital relationship and strengthen your connection with your partner?
Through the use of physical touch and intuitive connections, you can create an abundance of opportunities to enhance not only your emotions and health but your partner’s as well. Jim Coan has studied the neuroscience of emotional closeness. His research uncovered the emotional catalyst of your partner’s touch, and he is here to share his insights with you.
In this episode of Our.Love Podcast, join Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings as she sits down with Jim Coan, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Virginia, to discuss the love scale of a physical connection. Jim talks about the psychological effect of physical touch, ways to enhance romance by physical communication, and his research into the power of handholding to protect against stress.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
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If you want to build a strong long-lasting relationship with your significant other and explore new-exciting ways to engage each other, download our Our.Love app today - it is free!
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Episode Transcript
Intro 0:03
Welcome to Our.Love Podcast, where we share insights from top scientists and relationship experts on all things about love that are out of the box, refreshing and new. Now sit back, grab a cold drink, or hot one if you prefer. And enjoy today's episode.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 0:24
Hi, Jim, so great to have you.
Jim Coan 0:28
It's great to be here.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 0:29
I'm really, I'm really looking forward to talking today. Today, we're supposed to focus our time on the love scale of physical connection. And I'm hoping we can use both your research and your clinical practice to help our listeners understand what is physical connection, why is it important? How do we use it in our relationships? I'm really excited to talk about your research, in particular, your research around hand holding. But before we get to that, can we start with just a working definition of what physical connection is because I think when people hear physical connection, they think sexual intercourse, or whatever goes on, you know, in our bedroom behind closed doors, and I'm wondering if we can start with just a definition of physical connection?
Jim Coan 1:17
Well, I mean, it believe it or not, it's a little bit harder than it sounds because physical connection is really about your body. Touching my body physically, you know, but what does that mean? Physically, we can intuit my skin touching your skin. But in fact, you know, when when I when I say certain things to you, it has a an immediate physiological effect on your body. Is that a physical connection? Um, I think, I think what we should do for the purposes of most of today's conversation is focus on the more intuitive connection. What is the we're really talking about here? Is my body touching your body? I mean, you know, in the abstract.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 2:12
sense around zoom, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. Um, okay. So So you mean, you meet you're, you're suggesting that we really keep it to physical connection. But you're also suggesting that there are other ways people could connect physically? I sing a beautiful song, my partner's in the other room. He's physically activated for some reason.
Jim Coan 2:33
That's right. Yeah. Yeah, no question. And in fact, um, you know, if your partner is a is a robust singer, you might be able to, to hear your partner's voice to feel it in your sternum. Yeah, when they're singing loud enough. Yeah. You know, that's just a more exaggerated version of what happens we in our ears, and and you know, that movement of air that push of air we reach out and touch each other in that way.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 3:00
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it's so explains my music touches touches us, right? People have different kinds of music that they really, really like, and other music that they really, really don't like. Okay, so, so physical touch. I'm wondering if you'd be willing to play a little game with me to see if you and I together can come up with 10 really specific examples of physical touch just to give our listeners an idea of, it's not just sex, or sexual intercourse? I thought maybe we could go back and forth. Try to come up with 10 different ideas. I'll start with one, you'll go to two then you get the last word. Yeah, sure. All right. And I'm going to give you the one that I think you deserve, because it's the one you've researched a lot about. So I won't start with that one. I'm going to give that one to you. I'll start with physical touch through sexual intercourse. Okay. So we're just listing them or just listing I'm gonna keep a tally. We're at one.
Jim Coan 4:00
Okay. Well, we could say, hugging.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 4:06
Okay. I'm gonna say Wrestling. Wrestling. Yeah.
Jim Coan 4:11
Okay, I would say kissing.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 4:16
Okay. I'm going to say tickling.
Jim Coan 4:20
I'm going to say, handshake.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 4:24
All right, I'll say lap sitting.
Jim Coan 4:29
How about high fiving.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 4:32
Whoo. I like that. All right, how close were we? Are we two away? I think we might be two away. Cuddling,
Jim Coan 4:37
cuddling and then I think this is what you were referring to. I'm gonna say handholding
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 4:42
That one is yours? Definitely. You're very
Jim Coan 4:45
all of ours. It's everyone's.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 4:48
But decades of research on that. Yeah. So So again, I just want our listeners to be thinking about physical connection. Not just meaning intercourse, there could be tickling or touching or back rubbing or hand holding or high fiving. And opening up the ability to see all those things, I think makes it a little bit more accessible. Right? You can hear anywhere.
Jim Coan 5:18
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, even, you know, a colleague of mine at Yale named Michael Krause has studied how professional sports team players, SWAT each others butts. Yeah. And it matters to their team performance. Really? What's the what's the outcome? So the teams that that SWAT each other, do better? You know what, if you want a good relationship, you need to swat each others butts? That is bad advice, because some people are really going to not like that. Absolutely. If you do like it, then by all means, have at it, you are intimate partners. There are lots of ways for you to express physical affection with each other. And even if it's not, something traditionally considered, you know, affectionate like high fiving. Touching, there's so many ways, ways to do it. And so I think we'll talk about in a second. It's really important for your well being and for the well being of your relationship.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 6:25
Yeah, yeah. So in preparation for us, Tony, and thank you for that clarification, because I think part of what you're suggesting is that there's communication involved. Yes. Touching. And without communication, you can get yourself into some really, really deep, dark waters with someone, right? Oh, her neck, neck touched or someone that doesn't want their butt slapped, or somebody that doesn't want lots of honey? Or maybe it's the kissing Yeah. So in preparation for today, I did a very informal research, project, nothing like the research that you do. But I pulled 10 Friends, very small sample size, some of my colleagues, and I told them a little bit about you, and that we were talking and I asked him what what would you like for me to ask Jim? And the number one question was, what do I do if my need for touch and physical connection is different than my partner's?
Jim Coan 7:24
Yeah, this is this is very common. And it is not. It is not a catastrophe. It is, as you say, all about communication. One of the a similar question I get asked is, do people who are avoidantly attached? Or people who are introverts? Do they dislike touch? And the answer is no. They may like it at a different frequency or in a different way, we're at different times. But almost everyone, barring some significant issues, needs touch. And often, as we've learned, during this pandemic, that we've all been going through, they crave it. There's, there's a term called Touch hunger, the skin hunger, that the skin really most of most of us need some touch sometime. And it's not just any touch either. We need skin when you human skin to touch our human skin. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's easy to make jokes about it, or it's easy to trivialize it in other ways, especially in our culture. But it is not trivial at all. Um, babies will not develop cognitively if they don't get this not where they will, but they won't develop as well. Cognitively, they don't get skin on skin touch. One of the things that we've been steadily learning over the decades since I started is that, you know, our adult relationships, our love relationships are often in many ways analogues of those relationships we had with our caregivers when we were little people. And I think touch is one of them. I think that there are family cultures that either devalue touch or neglected touch. And other cultures were touching is and others like the one I grew up in where touching is just so ubiquitous, you don't even notice that it's occurring. Yeah. Um, and, you know, we all have to navigate those just like any other thing that we might have to be navigating.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 10:01
So one more thing. Yeah. So when working with a couple, the the mismatch on touch, you might treat as the same mismatch in kind of any other area where there's a mismatch. I mean, right? That you might be careful practices, how much they want to exercise?
Jim Coan 10:19
Yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, sex, sex comes up like that all the time for couples?
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 10:26
Well, that's the same question. Can I ask it? Sure. The second most popular question was, and you can probably anticipate this, what if my partner I, and I used to be physically close, I had lots of great sex back in the day, after X number of years of marriage, we barely even kissed anymore. What's your advice on how we can repair that?
Jim Coan 10:46
Well, there's a lot of advice about how you can repair that. One of the things funny, I just talked yesterday for this podcast, with Arthur Aron at university at SUNY Stony Brook, about what characterizes relationships that have been together for a long time. Believe it or not, these these, these unicorns do exist out there. couples that have been together for a long time and still report and in fact, show physiological evidence of being passionately in love, what's going on with them. And one of the things that we find is that they are committed to exploring new things together. So if you are in a rut, one of the things that you might want to consider is exploring new things together. And of course, you fold in, you know, everything from Esther Perel’s advice on, you know, newness and freshness and experience to Sue Johnson's advice on emotional safety and closeness. You can't have those shared experiences, without working on your safety together emotionally. And so I think that, even if we're just talking about hugs and kisses in the kitchen, you know, after work, to say nothing of what happens in the bedroom later, um, if if things have grown a little, little cold and stale, what you what people need to do, is have the courage together to try stuff. And, of course, like I said, that doesn't happen in a vacuum. That is going to require that emotional safety with each other to make a suggestion. You know, this could be, by the way, as simple as one of the John Gottman. You know, John and Julie Gottman recommendations of the the 32-second Kiss, yeah, maybe you come home, stand in the kitchen. You're like, Ah, I'm tired. I have to cook for everybody. This is miserable. But we've committed to the 32-second kiss. You know, the tricky thing about that is that sometimes one or the others just really isn't as interested in that. But the but the data, the data suggests that a 32-second Kiss could turn up the temperature a little bit later on.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 13:31
Yeah, yeah. So again, the skill of communication. And then also using this idea that there are lots of different kinds of physical touch that you could experiment with be curious about spend time working on together, and that may then lead to changes in the bedroom?
Jim Coan 13:53
Absolutely, yeah. What if you commit to sitting right next to each other? Like you're this is funny to say, but as if you're passionately in love faking it till you're making it maybe. But you know, whenever you watch a movie, or watch TV, or sit and listen to the radio, whatever it is, there are lots of ways that you can sort of hack that send it sounds silly, but it's really not. We often experience our lives after engaging in our lives. One of the things that we've learned from brain research is that almost the last thing we experience, the last thing our brain does, is serve up a conscious experience of what's going on. Great. So we can say, well, there's a rule rule is we have to be physically touching when we're doing this activity. And at first you're like, Okay, this is corny. But once that becomes a habit, then you are finding yourself physically touching more often?
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 15:03
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I will share with you that my partner and I did the 32nd Kissing for a little while, and sort of those early child rearing years. Were for me as a nursing mom, I was getting a lot of touching. Yes. And so there was a mismatch, right? I was like, Oh, I've been touched all day. Yeah, partner was not getting the same amount of level of touching. So we instituted the 32nd Kiss, and there was so much laughing at me, which was beautiful. And we use that. And I sometimes think that, that quality time and touching and humor, and laughter can all really build that sense of safety as you're talking about.
Jim Coan 15:50
Absolutely. Yeah. And in that safety, I can't emphasize enough that safety, that feeling that that whatever we're doing, everybody's open to it. And everybody's okay with making a blunder, right of some kind, is super, super important, because that will open up those spaces where you can laugh together.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 16:12
Yeah, yeah. You've spent, I think, decades studying couples in the lab. But when was it? When was your first sort of lab research study? What year?
Jim Coan 16:25
Oh, God. Well, I was first doing research with John Gottman in the 1990s, nearly 90 Well, nine, I started in 1990, in fact, and I worked with him until 1996. And spent a fair amount of that time as his sort of laboratory coordinator. So I ran the newlyweds study. And I coded the domestic violence study and the apartment lab study, I did all of that stuff. And we worked on the spathe, which is the specific ethnic coding system together. And for that research, we would bring couples into the laboratory, as is widely known, and we go them into fighting, which is extremely easy. There's just nothing to it.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 17:18
Same experience in my clinical practice, right, a couple makes an appointment they come in, it's pretty easy to get, you know, to get going. I don't have to pour much gasoline on the fire most
Jim Coan 17:27
couple quick questions. Nothing to it. Yeah,
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 17:31
yeah. So um, yeah, so so I'm just so impressed. So you spent so long studying this. And I read a quote somewhere, someone I'm not I don't think it came from from you. But it wasn't love is both art and science. Mm hmm. And I was wondering if you have any thoughts about that, and that maybe can help us to bleed into your hand holding study that I'm so excited to hear about?
Jim Coan 17:59
Well, I would, I would, I would add a bit to that, quote, I would modify it a little bit. And I would say that science is both art and science. Yes, you know, the the thing is, all of the things that we do, whether it's engage in a love relationship with our partner, or design experiments, or write a novel, all of these things are creative activities. And I think that it it really helps to view them that way. What can we create? What can we create, together? How do we go about creating? What kind of new stuff can we try? And how can we share the experience of that stuff?
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 18:50
In that way, again, I hear the communication but there's also intention. Mm hmm. And I think so many couples, at least the ones that I often see in my office, sort of, there's not a lot of intention, there's not a lot of intention, they just sort of you know, fell in love maybe had that really lustful honeymoon phase and then there were the kids and then whatever, but there wasn't a lot of intention along the way. And I know a lot of you know therapist talk about make sure you're having date nights during the childbearing years with your partner like that's a way to set intentions around the the relationship. So I hear you kind of talking about being aware of and maybe increasing communication and also being aware of an increasing intentions, intentions to create something together,
Jim Coan 19:39
intentions to create and also a commitment to create. I mean, the thing is, these these are the more mundane aspects of relationship in some sense, we we have a culture that often expects us to be swept off our feet with perfect love and you're either in love or you're not in love. And if you're a
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 20:01
movie say,
Jim Coan 20:02
That's right, and the movies are, you can quote me on this, quote, Our.Love Company, the movies are bullshit. The they are there. To adopt that understanding of adult love is to ensure misery going on and on because one way or another, as any marital therapist in the world knows one way or another, whether it no matter how your relationship started, one way or another, you come up against this period where you have to start deciding if to start deciding what you're going to do. Yeah, how are you going to do it? Yeah, just start structuring things a little bit. Maybe you have kids, maybe there's a move that you have to make, maybe there's financial hardship, maybe you're just bored. Yeah. And, you know, we think things like, well, we're not supposed to be bored. If we're really in love, but you know, you can get bored. The question is, can you talk about it, and then creatively solve that problem. And this, to me gets gets us back to our, the beginning of our conversation about, you know, what, if you know that question from your therapist, friends, you know, what if one person doesn't like to touch and the other person does? Well, there's a creative, there's a problem that you have to creatively figure out how to how to explore and solve. And I think what you mean by intention, is a good faith effort to like, really try and make this figure out a thing that will work for everybody.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 21:49
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. the van lab. Are you doing now? Is the director of the van lab similar research that you've done in the past?
Jim Coan 21:57
No, well, I mean, sort of, we're still studying relationships. But you know, towards the end of the time that I was working in John Gottman lab, because I still keep in touch with him all the time. And we he and Julie and I talk about things, and it's great fun. But um, you know, right about that time, in 1995 1996, there was this thing that John actually told me about was called magnetic resonance imaging, it was this way to look at inside the brain and take pictures of it while it was doing stuff. And that just kept took hold of me. And at that time, those kinds of things weren't really available many places, including where I wound up going to grad school against everybody's prediction, I went to the University of Arizona to work with a guy named John Allen. And John was not studying relationships at all. But he was really open to me, you know, training me, you know, in the brain, the physiology of the brain, the structure of the brain, the function of the brain. And I spent, you know, a good decade, doing that with him, and then going on to my postdoc with Richie Davidson at the University of Wisconsin Madison. And all the time, though, the whole time. Sort of in my back pocket was this simmering plan to get back to couples because what I wanted to do with couples is what John Gottman had done with couples, which was merge the study of autonomic physiology with couple communication. Right. I wanted to do that with the brain. Yeah, I wanted to be the brain guy. Yeah. Well, it's hard. It's a lot easier to measure. You know, autonomic physiology, like heart rate and stuff.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 24:08
Yeah, you get a pulse oximeter for 15 bucks and you're down.
Jim Coan 24:12
Well, yeah, that's right. And in for brain imaging, you have to stick a whole body and a little tube that they barely fit into, yeah, put a thing over their face and subject them to very very loud noises in an uncomfortable you know, situation for a long time. And as you can imagine, this is not that conducive to marital communication. So, along the the the way I doing my clinical work, I was so lucky. I was able to spend a good year working with Do era veterans who were having late onset PTSD, often related to, you know, neural deterioration and inhibitory circuits in their prefrontal cortex stopped me if I'm getting jargony. Because I sometimes can lapse into that. You're good so far, but there was one fellow who came in who, you know, had experienced just a trauma on the level that I can't. When I finally learned about it, I it was hard for me to even fathom, it still is hard for me to fathom anyone going through this. But the point is, I would have achieved a lot of success by doing exposure therapy, PTSD based exposure therapy, and, you know, progressive relaxation techniques, and he wouldn't do any of them. As long as there, you know, he had these terrible symptoms he had to come in. But as long as there was the possibility that he would have to talk about what had happened, he would just completely shut down. Yeah. At some point, he asked if he could come in with his wife. And I said, Sure, sure, why not? And she came in. And we tried, again, to get to the point where we could maybe start talking about some of his traumatic experiences in the in the war. And he started freezing. And she reached over and she clasped his hand. And suddenly, he started to ball and shake and tell the story. And the thing is, I learned some, you know, as as you know, when you do clinical work, you you learn things on the spot with experiences with people that yeah, that often there are no, there's no research for Yeah. Do you have like an existence proof for a case that that alerts you to something and one of the things that I learned was that, that handholding was doing something more than calming him down? Because he didn't calm down at all? Yeah, he became hugely expressive and deeply, deeply. Almost violently wracked with pain and sobs. Yeah, because of the hand holdling. So what was the hand holding? Doing? I wanted to find that out. Yeah, I did what anybody would do. And I designed an fMRI study to see if we could get to the bottom of it.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 27:41
I'm not sure that's what anyone would do. But thank goodness you did it, Jim. Because I thought that research is fascinating.
Jim Coan 27:49
Oh, thank you. Um, what are the things we've learned since then, is, you know, we've done dozens of these studies now. And it is really clear that physical touch is changing the way that our brain processes information about the world. Yeah, one way that that can manifest is that physical touch can sooth this and make it make us feel better. And that's great. That's definitely one thing that that it can do. But that's what everybody thinks of when the candle. But it does way more than that. It opens up new vistas by giving us courage to experience fear, at a greater level, you have to experience stress at a more of a higher intensity, you know, when we're with other people that we're close to our perception of ourself is enlarged to include the resources that they have, as well as the resources that we have. Great. And that is that's true, no matter what we you know, if we, we can be told that that our close loved one is in the other room, and we'll get a little bit of that effect. They're standing right next to us. It'll help they're sitting next to us. It'll help. But there is nothing that we can do. That's less ambiguous. That's more clear than physical touch. Yeah. Wow. So the brain, it's special, that physical touch, we now know as of just two years ago, we now know that the physical touch actually has analgesic effects. It works like a painkiller. And it does that on a system of the brain called the neurologic pain signature, that no psychological interventions have ever been shown to have an effect on.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 29:49
So you have subjects in the lab and you somehow I don't know inflict pain and in a bucket of water shock
Jim Coan 29:56
them or we hit them with a hot thermal load and then we shot their partner, we're going to shock you pretty soon. Um, you know, the we, you know, the thing is if we want to know how the brain is processing these trials that we all go through in life, then we have to see the brain going through those trials and do that stuff. So in this study, we had a hot thermo mode attached to their arm, and it ramps up quickly. So people feel like they're getting burned, but they're not really getting burned. Yeah. And this causes activation in a very specific region of the brain that's been studied intensely by a guy named Tor Wager at Dartmouth University in that region, that pain processing system, like I said, is impervious to psychological interventions of any kind, you know, and he's been studying the heck out of this right hand holding did it. Wow, touch touch? Is it occupies some strange space that we haven't really delineated yet in our science, that that is in between or overlapping, the psychological and the physiological?
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 31:14
Yeah, yeah. If when you talk about it, there's there's almost a magical aspect to it. But it's not, but it's not we, the research you're doing is proving that it's not magic, there is science behind skin to skin contact with a partner, and what effects that can have on your brain and you're getting you and your lab partners, you're getting to see that in real time on the brain scans. Yeah. So
Jim Coan 31:43
while it's happening, yeah, it's really it's really extraordinary. And you can see it sometimes, even in single individuals, we had a reporter from NPR news, Barbara Bradley Haggerty, come and visit the lab. And she visited not with a romantic partner, because we we said, you know, come down with someone that you trust the most. And she came down with her close friend of decades, a person that she had been through, they had both been through cancer together, and they had suffered together and that that creates incredible bonds. Yes. And this person holding Barb's hand in the scanner, we were able to see in a single individual, which is not so easy to do. Decreased activation and a region of the brain called the hypothalamus, which our listeners may be interested to know is responsible for the release of hormones into your bloodstream, that, in the short term, give you lots of extra power to deal with a stressor, but in the long term make you sick, right. And so if you can decrease activation in the hypothalamus, when you're under stress, chances are, you're going to be more able to fight off infections, your wounds will heal more quickly, you'll grow hair more quickly, you'll you'll you know, you'll just be healthier. And the touch of someone that you trust can help you get there. Yeah.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 33:24
Wow. I mean, that's just so beautiful is beautiful. And it's some ways such a simple thing that we could all do in our relationships. But when you describe it, it has this huge, you know, can have this huge impact. Not only I would guess, on the on yourself, but also on your partner and then the two people for if we're looking at it as it as a twosome in a partnership, right is on the couple.
Jim Coan 33:47
Yeah, that's right. Um, you know, some people might my my friend and fellow researcher, David Sbarra, likes to talk about how these processes are hidden. They're hidden regulators. And I want to say a little bit about what that means. Because a hidden regulator, you and your partner are hidden regulators for each other. Right? Meaning that you don't really know how much you're affecting each other until you need it. Yeah. Right. And then you find out, but the truth is that you're building that regulatory capacity all the time. And then one of us in the hospital with something serious. Maybe there's pain, maybe you're having a hard time getting your blood pressure down. Yeah. And that touch will suddenly you'll see it make a huge difference. And I can say this now because, you know, we have the studies, but we also have just zillions of anecdotes. Once we started doing these studies. I started hearing from nurses and physicians, you know, all over the world. giving me these anecdotes of it. particularly blood pressure, but, you know, pain, fear, you know, anyone who's had kids knows that, you know, they want to sit on your lap. You know, sometimes they'll get more afraid because now they're safe to have that fear. But that's okay. There, that means that they're gonna they're gonna learn the value of courage because of your support.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 35:23
Right? Right. You can have a quote in one of your writings, we are each other's habitat. I love that. That's exactly what what you're talking about. Yeah, they're each other's habitat.
Jim Coan 35:41
You know, when I tell you anything more
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 35:43
you want to say about
Jim Coan 35:44
Yeah, well, so this grew out of a real dilemma for me. So when I did my first hand holding study, we thought we were going to, to find the neural mechanism that took handholding, and transformed it into less of a threat response. And we knew that was going to be the prefrontal cortex. Because the prefrontal cortex is how we regulate our emotions. If you tell yourself yourself, this is only a movie that I'm watching, that's not real blood, that's fake blood, you're using your prefrontal cortex to tell yourself a story, in order to talk your sensory experience out of believing that what you're seeing is real. Right? That's incredible. For one, that's, that's a human thing. Other critters cannot do that. Right. But um, you know, nobody had ever done one of these hand holding studies before, and I wanted to get published in Science. So um, so I thought, well, I'm going to show that you're going to touch hands, and it's going to increase activity in your prefrontal cortex. And that's going to decrease activity and your threat response, and then I'm going to get so famous. And that didn't happen at all. Instead, the prefrontal cortex got really quiet it like it was like magic. It's like the hand of God just came in and went, you know, no more threat response. Right, right, turn off, turn off. That's me a bit of a crisis, although we did get some news media, but my mom, you know, called me up after our first handholding study wound up in the New York Times. And she said, This is how you get into the New York Times. By telling people that handholding makes you less stressed out, you're gonna get threatened. She's like, You should have called me because I could have saved you so much time. And what she was implicitly saying is, this isn't interesting unless you know why, or what's going on. And all of this is a long way of saying that. This got me thinking about, well, what is the human habitat? What is the baseline for a human that a human brain expects to find when it wakes up in the morning, and when it bursts forth out of the void as a little person? And you know, if you look at a salamander, you know, a salamanders. habitat is a cool, damp, dark environment with bugs around to eat. And if it doesn't have that environment, it freaks out. And what I mean by freaking out is that it has a stress response. And the stress response is designed to get it back into that environment. Well, handholding is not adding a bit of emotion regulation, like telling yourself it's only a movie handling is going back to our environment. Yeah, getting back to our habitat. Yeah. And that's why we don't see that prefrontal division. It's because there's nothing to react to.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 38:41
Yeah, oh, so much more to talk about, I'd love for us if we get a chance to get together again to talk about how that's related to the parent child relationship. So many more questions for you about the research moving forward at the fan lab. Maybe you'll come back, and we'll get a chance to talk again. But before we end, anything else you want to share? You want to share where people can find you if they're curious?
Jim Coan 39:08
Well, I'm sure you can just Google, Jim Coan or James Coan, and you'll find me but that the thing that I really want to say is, in the time that we've been through this pandemic, a lot of us have not been able to touch the people that we love most or be in physical proximity to them. And one of the questions that I've been getting from a lot of news media over the years, the last two years is what do we do now? We've we you know, you're the touch guy now we can't touch we're doomed, right? And at first I was like, Yeah, we're doomed shit. And then I started really digging into the literature on what people do all over the world, in every culture, when they are stressed when the experience famine, Natural disasters, etc. And touching is a big part of it. But so is something that the anthropologist dryly called coordinated movement dancing together. So that is really big that the other thing is singing. And I had this experience with a reporter from the New Yorker magazine, she called up and she, in our conversation, she told me just how sad she was being alone in her apartment for weeks. And I thought I should sing her a song. I said, You want me to sing you a song? And she said, Are you? Are you kidding? Right now? Are you serious? I said, Yeah, I'm gonna sing you a little song. And here's the song ready to sing it to you. So quick, my daughter taught it to me. Poor bird take by fly high above the sorrow of this sad NIH. And this reporter got really emotional. And she said, Oh, my God, I had no idea how much I needed that. I had no idea. Yeah. And what I've been doing is asking my students in large classes that I'm teaching, even over zoom, to sing to each other.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 41:18
Oh, I love it. I love it's a way of touching without the actual physical touch. Right? I have a physiological response to hearing your voice. Yeah, your new scene in particular.
Jim Coan 41:30
And, you know, Sue Johnson helped me figure out how this works. This works because I take a chance with you by doing something vulnerable. reaching out and touching someone is taking taking such a chance. Yes, you're going to reach out and touch your skin to their skin, you're going to sing. Even though you have a bad voice, right? You're gonna maybe write a poem, you're gonna do something that makes your heart vulnerable to them. Yeah, they respond. Which they almost always will do. They respond with, Oh, my God, I love that. And you are built up, you're getting some of that nourishment that you need. Through that combination of vulnerability and acceptance. That's beautiful.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 42:21
So reach out and touch someone and reach out and sing. Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you, Jim. This has been so delightful. I really mean it. I hope we can do this again. And I find some more time to learn more about your research and talk more about these experiences. I appreciate it.
Jim Coan 42:41
Yeah. Thanks for your great questions.
Dr. Keely Sikes Rollings 42:43
Great to see you.
Outro 42:49
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