Episode 35 - Dr. Rachel Herz: Scents and Sensibilities
Smell. Why do some people like a certain smell and others hate it? Is smell personal or cultural? How does smell affect our choices and our daily lives? Of the five senses, smell is the one we have the fewest words for. And yet, our sense of smell, and our reactions to and interpretations of smell, is essential to our physical and emotional well-being. Meet Dr. Rachel Herz, psychologist, researcher, faculty at Brown University, author of “The Scent of Desire: Discovering our Enigmatic Sense of Smell”, and one of the foremost experts on the sense of smell. Join us for a lively and interesting conversation about this little talked about area of human experience. Dr. Herz has great insights into how our sense of smell functions, what purpose it serves, and shows how inextricably it is linked to our survival. And don’t miss the great exercise Dr. Herz has for us to try at home!
Transcript
Transcript
Chip August: Welcome to Sex, Love and Intimacy. I’m your host, Chip August. Today on the show we are going to be talking about scent. We’re going to be talking about our sense of smell and we are going to be talking with Dr. Rachel Herz.
Dr. Rachel Herz: Not to denigrate the male sex, but it’s really woman who use their sense of smell as a key determinate for who will be the right person that they should mate with.
Dr. Rachel Herz: The problem with smell and the emotional association they make to them is once we form them they are very indelibly imprinted, it’s very hard to undo and reconnect to the same smell, so what I would actually suggest is that you tell the guy, buy completely new cologne to wear during this phase of sort of reconnecting with your spouse and then work on all the things about making yourself much more appealing to her, so now the new cologne smell is connected to you, so you’re not working with the old smell which has too many barriers in its way. So you take something new and you try to start over from there.
Chip August: Dr. Herz is recognized as a world leading expert on the psychology of smells who’s the author of a terrific booked called The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. Since 2000 she’s been on the faculty of Brown University. She’s considered one of the foremost experts on the sense of smell and that’s led her to a bunch of radio and television interviews; she’s had appearances on The Discovery Channel, ABC News, the BBC, NPR, The Learning Channel. She’s had examples of her work appear in science museums around the country and is the subject of a scientific American profile piece. She’s regularly interviewed in a wide array of print media; everything from The New Yorker to The New York Times to Time Magazine, and in fact I’ve bumped into Dr. Herz in Psychology Today, the November-December 2007 issue had a thing on the hidden force of fragrance. So welcome Rachel Herz.
Dr. Rachel Herz: Thank you very much Chip.
Chip August: I am really thrilled to be talking about all this sense of smell. I think it’s sort of one of those underrated senses that people don’t talk about very much. You know, we’re in a visual society, sometimes a tactile society, but I notice we don’t talk a lot about odor.
Dr. Rachel Herz: Well that’s completely true and one of the reasons we don’t talk about odor is actually we don’t have very many words to be able to describe our olfactory experiences. In fact, in any known language there are fewer words that are exquisitely related to our experiences of smell than anything else, and so we often borrow metaphors from other things to try to describe our smell experiences, but smell is also very disconnected from language on another level. It’s kind of like emotion in the sense that if I were to say, “Tell me why you love her”, it would be hard for you to articulate, and the same sort of thing is true if I say, “Tell me why you like that smell” or “What is special about that smell experience?”, so there’s, it’s difficult to talk about it in many ways and people do relegate it down to the dustbin of our senses generally speaking because we are, as you said, so visual.
Chip August: And yet for me it seems so related to taste and we have all these culinary words, we have all these like, you know, taste reviews and things. There’s so many words for tastes and so few for smells. I wonder why that is.
Dr. Rachel Herz: Well yes, but actually you know what’s funny, when you say taste, taste is only salt, sour, sweet and bitter and the fifth sensation unami which is the taste of protein, and everything else that we think we mean when we say taste is actually flavor and it all comes from smell.
Chip August: Ohhh.
Dr. Rachel Herz: So if you didn’t have a sense of smell your experience of food would be terrible. It would be, you know, the only way you would get from steak is salt, the only thing you would get from chocolate is a little bit of sweet and bitter and, you know, depending on what kind of chocolate it was, and all of our experiences of the food world, which are so important, so hedonistically connected to us would be completely bare.
Chip August: Wow. I had no idea.
Dr. Rachel Herz: And actually when people lose their sense of smell they become highly depressed, and in fact I begin the book with a little anecdote about, well I don’t know if it’s a little anecdote, but about Michael Hutchins from Inxs who as I’m sure you know was found dead in his hotel room in Sydney Australia hanging from a noose that was self-made, and in terms of tracking back what led to that incident, he lost his sense of smell several years before and it actually had an extremely devastating impact on his whole sense of being, his sense of wellness, his sense of life, and I’m not saying that was the reason why he…
Chip August: Right.
Dr. Rachel Herz: killed himself, but the depression that became so devastating to him was partly at least to do with losing his sense of smell and that happens to other people as well.
Chip August: Wow, wow. So this is really, our sense of smell is one of the keys to a sense of well-being, huh?
Dr. Rachel Herz: Yes, it’s very deeply connected to our emotional existence.
Chip August: And yet it seems, our sense of smell to me seems to be really personal, like, you know, I like certain smells that my wife really doesn’t like, she likes smells that I don’t like. It seems very personal.
Dr. Rachel Herz: Well that’s actually a fantastic point that you raise because unlike what most people sort of assume that everybody dislikes the smell of skunk and everyone likes the smell of rose, in fact all of our likes and dislikes when it comes to smell is learned and it’s either learned through personal experience or through cultural experience. I mean the rose and the skunk is somewhat culturally based, but you’re going to find individuals, myself being one of them, who say, “I like the smell of skunk”, and that has to do with a personal experience, so there are some exceptions to this rule when it comes to sensations that certain odors bring with them, and that being painful and that being aversive, but apart from that a smell is liked or disliked because of your own personal past with it.
Chip August: So, so for instance, so I’m also a person who’s not particularly turned off by the scent of skunk, but I’ve never been, I’ve never actually been sprayed by a skunk, so I associate that smell for me with times when I’ve been out camping, times when I’ve had, you know, pleasant experiences in the woods and particularly here in Northern California in the spring when the skunks are mating, you can sort of smell that, that musky smell and it just sort of reminds me of sort of a woodland experience, makes me laugh, you know. Is that why I don’t, you know, I don’t have a negative experience so it’s a positive one?
Dr. Rachel Herz: Exactly. That’s exactly why.
Chip August: And so each of us finds our own way in that?
Dr. Rachel Herz: Exactly. Absolutely. We definitely do.
Chip August: Okay, so I have this personal sense of smell and I notice that I’m, now I’m with women, I’m with partners, right, and some smell really good to me and some don’t smell really good, I, you know, I’m, I think all of us have this experience of, of burying our nose in our partners hair for instance and just….
Dr. Rachel Herz: Mm hmm.
Chip August: you know the, when that feels great it’s great and when it isn’t it isn’t, you know.
Dr. Rachel Herz: Right, yeah.
Chip August: Is there like a, is there a lock and key kind of thing going on? Am I like, am I searching, is my nose searching for the scents that going to, you know, help me fall in love, is that?
Dr. Rachel Herz: Well a little bit of that is true actually, and not to denigrate the male sex but it’s really women who use their sense of smell as a key determinant for who will be the right person that they should mate with, and this goes…
Chip August: Ooh.
Dr. Rachel Herz: yes, this goes back to an evolutionary sort of understanding of the war between the sexes in terms of, you know, the goals etcetera of reproduction and the human species, and it turns our, well that doesn’t turn out but we all know, that from a sort of cult benefit analysis, and you have to realize that evolutionary theory basically comes from the idea that we’re only basically walking vehicles for our genes…
Chip August: Right.
Dr. Rachel Herz: and the most important thing is that we are literally going forth and multiplying, getting as many copies of ourselves out there as possible.
Chip August: Not that just many, but as many and each one, each generation healthier than the next.
Dr. Rachel Herz: Right, well the idea is that, you know, the offspring that you have should be able to reproduce and so forth and prosper themselves, exactly. So, you know, if you have 20 children and 19 died it would be the equivalent of having 1…
Chip August: Right.
Dr. Rachel Herz: that was successful, so it isn’t, you know, pure numbers but, but the idea of being that if you, you know, can support the, the children that you have then they will go forth and be healthy, but actually you hit upon an extremely important point here and that being health, and so men, men in this game as it were have very little cost as it were in the act of reproduction and in, ostensibly also in the rearing of a child to, during the critical period of its health or early life, and as a function of this, you know, they can have hundreds, thousands of sexual partners, but the key word here is ‘possible’ because until the advent of genetic testing, you as a male would never be 100 percent certain that the little baby presented before you was yours, you have to rely on the honesty of the woman saying, “This is your son, now help me out.” And then you would be investing your time and energy and resources and so for and it. However women have a, you know, an enormous physical cost to reproduction, in terms of the times of pregnancy, the fact also that prior to the, you know, development of milk formulas and so forth. If a woman stopped breastfeeding, or sorry, if the woman became pregnant while she was breastfeeding she would cease lactating…
Chip August: Right.
Dr. Rachel Herz: and if there were no other food sources available her infant could starve to death.
Chip August: Right.
Dr. Rachel Herz: So you have not only all the energy and so forth that it takes to have a baby for a woman, but you have a time block too, they say three years, you know, while you can’t do anything else with anyone else. So, however you know 100 percent for certain that this baby is your genetic material. So, what, where does this come down to be important? Well, if I have all this invested in this little creature I want to make damn sure that this little one is going to make it to survive and thrive and go out and be healthy and multiply herself…
Chip August: Mm hmm.
Dr. Rachel Herz: and the best way of being able to ensure that is by mating with somebody else, having this baby with someone who not only is healthy, but also has an immune system, because that’s where we get our health from, that’s complimentary to mine, and what I mean by that is not an overlap of everything, and it’s not a hundred miles away from me but it’s like that perfect match that the good things that I have will be expressed and if I cover a certain set of diseases with my genes that you’ll cover another set and so our child has the best chance of being healthy him or herself. And it turns out that the outward manifestation of our immune system that everyone is unique for is represented by our body odor. So everybody on the planet, unless you have an identical twin, has a unique body odor, which is how the tracking dog finds you when you escape from a jail cell…
Chip August: Mm hmm.
Dr. Rachel Herz: And this unique body odor is literally your set of odor print for your immune system, and as a woman when I smell somebody and I say, “Mm, he smells really good”, it turns out what I’m actually experiencing at that moment of assessment of being really good is someone whose immune system works well with mine. Now there’s not like a one to one, there’s this set of men that will be good for me and my genes and then sets that will be good for my best friend that could be totally different from me. So I like to say there’s no Brad Pitt of body odor.
Chip August: So does that one, does that like one, I shouldn’t strive for one particular smell ideal here.
Dr. Rachel Herz: No but there’s, there’re two little sort of little problems with modern society that tend to mess this up a little bit. All this is true and works when women are not taking birth control pills…
Chip August: Ohhh.
Dr. Rachel Herz: so hormonal contraception. Women who do take birth control pills or some other form of hormonal contraception actually make big mistakes when it comes to smelling who smells the sexiest in terms, and deciding that’s a guy that’s right for me. In fact, the pick men who are more similar to them genetically and sort of, it’d be like picking your brothers as it were, as opposed to, or not quite that close but…
Chip August: Right, but not enough diversity.
Dr. Rachel Herz: Exactly. And the other thing which is a problem in our modern society is the use of cologne by men and women are actually very influenced in a positive way by men’s cologne. So a man who is biologically wrong for a certain woman can mask that and lure her by wearing a cologne that she really likes and by the time she finds out what he really smells like because she’ll be in love with him at that point it’s too late because he can smell like anything at that point and if you’re in love, like with the skunk example, if you like the experience emotionally you like the smell.
Chip August: Wow. Okay, now just hold this thought ‘cause this is fascinating and I got lots of questions, but we got to take a pause for a moment. I’ve got sponsors that I would love to support ‘cause they support me. So we’re going to be right back. We’re talking with Dr. Rachel Herz. She’s the author of The Scent of Desire. You’re listening to Sex, Love and Intimacy and we’ll be right back.
Chip August: We’re back. You’re listening to Sex, Love and Intimacy. I’m your host Chip August, and we are talking to Dr. Rachel Herz. Dr. Herz is the author of The Scent of Desire. We’ve been talking about our sense of smell. Rachel, when we took the break you were saying something about how men’s cologne can disguise the natural smell that a woman is looking to find out to see if, with our genetics are going to be compatible. I’m kind of curious about this whole thing ‘cause I coach clients, I coach couples sometimes ‘cause you know I lead workshops in love and intimacy and sexuality and, sometimes I hear this, actually pretty often I hear, I, the woman will say, “I just don’t like the way he smells anymore. You know, like I used to, I used, you know, I used to like, liked to just get his t-shirt after he wore it and smell it and now, you know, he just doesn’t smell good anymore.” What happens? Do we, does our smell change? What, what, what, what happens?
Dr. Rachel Herz: Well my theory on that, and I’ve also heard that very frequently from marital counselors is that what could possibly be happening is lets just say because the pill has been such a primary mode of birth control that the woman met her husband while she was on the pill and so she was actually attracted to someone who was not necessarily biologically optimal for her, and that over the course of a relationship the mode of birth control changed and now she is no longer on the pill and her smell, her ability to smell him, her perception of the smell has no altered such that he is now smelling like something that she would not have chosen from the point of view…
Chip August: Mm hmm.
Dr. Rachel Herz: of biological compatibility. Now that’s one possibility. Another possibility is that like I said because of the fact that emotion is so much the influence of why we like or dislike things, that when it comes to a relationship if you’re beginning to find the person that you are spending your time with really repugnant to you in various ways and really don’t like being around them then all sorts of things about them will become unpleasant and annoying, and because smell is so sort of viscerally emotional it can really become this sort of blockade between, you know, becoming intimate with the person in physical terms and just sort of the emblem of what you find disgusting or repulsive about this person now because the sense of smell in that respect is also very much tied to our feelings of repulsion…
Chip August: Mmm.
Dr. Rachel Herz: as well as to desire.
Chip August: So, I don’t think you’re headed here, but thinking as a coach so if I can help the couple really look at their resentments and what’s fueling the repugnance, perhaps I can change the experience of the smell, and alternately if I tell the guy he should use different cologne maybe I can make a go about it, make…
Dr. Rachel Herz: Well you know, this is what I, I would think, the problem with smell and the emotional associations we make to them is once we form them they’re very indelibly printed, it’s very hard to undo and reconnect to the same smells, so what I would actually suggest is that you tell the guy, buy a completely new cologne to wear during this phase of sort of reconnecting with your spouse and then work on all the things about making yourself more appealing to her. So now the new cologne smell is connected to you, so you not working with the old smell which has too many barriers in its way. But you pick something new and you try to start over from there.
Chip August: And I have to say in my world it’s not a lot of colognes but I would tell, I think I would tell people to change their soap, change their deodorant, change their, you know, like, like, you know, it’s not, it’s not, it doesn’t have to be so overpowering, the cologne or perfume.
Dr. Rachel Herz: But whatever their sort of signature smell is, if they tend to use a certain shampoo or soap, like you said, that becomes part of what they smell like, and to make a change, but make a change with something which have an obvious scent to it, so it, so that the relearning can take place where smell is kind of there.
Chip August: Is some of what smells pleasant to us enough, pleasant to us cultural?
Dr. Rachel Herz: Absolutely, I mean the best place to see this is with food, and like I said, food is so much about our experience of smell that you could look cross culturally and see what one culture finds disgusting another finds phenomenal. I mean, one of the great examples I think is cheese. You know, westerners find cheese to be delicious and gourmet and comfort food where all positive connotations, whereas Asians find it totally disgusting, and there’s nothing from an inherent protein or nutrient value content analysis that would dictate that, it all has to do with the cultural connotations.
Chip August: Well year and of course if you ask the average American to sample what the French would consider their greatest cheese, most of us would be, would consider it awful, so, you know, the Lindebergers and the Gorganzollas with the, the really strong smells for a lot of Americans just over the top.
Dr. Rachel Herz: Right. There’s also a great example of the differences in a smell which I think would be surprising to some of your listeners and that’s the smell of wintergreen mint and the fact that Americans actually find this a very positive smell and one study it was in fact ranked the most positive smell in a set of other smells people were testing, and in the United Kingdom it’s actually considered a really terrible smell and you’d think, you know, the US and England, they’re not that far apart…
Chip August: Right.
Dr. Rachel Herz: two countries separated by a common language type of thing, and yet it has to do with the connotation of those smells and how they have been culturally acquired, and it turns out that in the UK wintergreen smell first of all is exclusively connected with medicine and particularly anelgesic rubs and in fact was very popular in an anelgesic rub that was prevalent during World War 2, a terrible time in that country’s history. And so when people smell wintergreen they think of war, medicine, you know, not good associations at all, whereas for us it’s exclusively connected with candy and gum. So, you know, it’s very interesting how our personal interactions with smells can produce such vast differences in response.
Chip August: Okay, so now does aromatherapy work? I, you know, I have friends who, you know, they sort of try to treat their various ills by putting different smells in the house, you know, essential oils and things. Does that work?
Dr. Rachel Herz: Well it works via the association connection. So, in, it’s not a pharmacological effect, so smelling lavender for instance is not giving you the same effect as giving, you know, taking Valium would. It is producing the effect if it does produce an effect because you have acquired the associations of relaxation to it. We know lavender in this country through baths and massage products and so forth and so that’s the way it’s presented and if we have an intentionality, like we want to feel relaxed and we know this is a relaxing scent and it, it has that kind of emotional connection for us, then we will feel relaxed when we smell it, but if it’s not, if we don’t feel that way about it then it’s not going to work, if I for instance really can’t stand the smell of lavender, it’s certainly not going to relax me, in fact it might agitate me. And so, it’s not the way, you know, aromatherapy quote/unquote works through the connections that we’ve formed with the smell and not because of some inherent magical or medicinal aspect of the smell that’s in terms to it.
Chip August: So there’s no, I’m looking for the trick and of course there isn’t one, right, so there’s no, there’s no like, “Well if I always smell like cookies then people are always going to like me”, you know, there, there isn’t one is there?
Dr. Rachel Herz: No, unfortunately, and, you know, a great example with this so-called, you know, aromas that everyone seems to love is the story that a woman once told me about her experience with the smell of rose and she really hated the smell of rose because the first time she ever smelled rose was at her mothers funeral. So here you have an example of, you know, in the opposite direction of something where, you know, culturally it’s assumed it’s a very pleasant smell and so forth, and yet an individuals experience is going to come up short. However, that being said, you know, you can make some good cultural guesses. So North Americans like the smell of cookies and so if you use cookies now you’ll probably make more friends than enemies.
Chip August: That’s kind of why I picked it, you know, it’s like I think when you sell houses they suggest like you bake cookies or you bake bread.
Dr. Rachel Herz: Right, or apple pie and all those sort of homemade associations get brought up, absolutely.
Chip August: I get it. And so really, it’s much about this link between memory and smell, this link between, so if we have a positive association with something then we have that positive association and we’re just going to use smell to kind of enhance that.
Dr. Rachel Herz: Exactly.
Chip August: Yeah. So, here’s the thing, if I lost my sense of smell, I understand I might get depressed, I understand I would lose my taste. Will I, will I stop loving, will I feel less loving toward my partner because I can no longer smell her? Will I, does that all get turned off also?
Dr. Rachel Herz: Well that’s also a fantastic question and in fact one of the reasons why I wrote the book, The Scent of Desire, is because I was an expert witness in a case where a woman had lost her sense of smell in a car accident and she’d been someone who had never really considered her sense of smell to be very important and not only was she suffering from a serious depression when I met her, but all sorts of other aspects of her life had really fallen apart, and one of the aspects of her life that had fallen apart, and she was only, you know, 28 and had been married for a couple of years and everything was fine and, you know, she had planned to have a family and so forth, but she felt that she could no longer be sexually intimate with her husband, she had literally lost that feeling for him because of her loss of smell, and she also decided that she couldn’t be a mother because she was worried that she wouldn’t be able to smell the burning cookies for instance or detect the sour milk. Now that’s, you know, possibly someone who’s having a more extreme reaction to losing their sense of smell than someone else might, but it certainly is definitely involved with our sense of the other, our attraction to the other and also our sense of our self, you know, who are we? It’s like being in a way blind to yourself when you lose your sense of smell and blind to that kind of emotional depth within yourself that has, you know, a sensual and a sexual quality to it.
Chip August: This is, this is all just, I love this, I could talk about this for hours and hours and hours, but I want to pause again and give a chance to let our sponsors support us and let us support our sponsors. You’re listening to Sex, Love and Intimacy. I’m your host Chip August. Please come back after this break because Dr. Herz is going to give us an exercise, something you can do at home, and we’re going to talk a little bit more about scent and smell and all of what we’ve been talking about. So come on back after this break please.
Chip August: We’re back. You’re listening to Sex, Love and Intimacy. I’m your host Chip August. I’m talking to Dr. Rachel Herz, the author of The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. Rachel you’ve been a great guest. It’s really been terrific talking to you. I’m wondering, how did you get interested in researching smell?
Dr. Rachel Herz: Well, the short answer is I was a biology undergraduate and then when I began graduate school I sort of made a few false stats in the sort of biopsychology realm of things thinking that I was really more of a biologist than in fact I was from the animal perspective, and in fact I was taking a course and feeling fairly lost in terms of what I though I was going to be doing for dissertation when I came across a paper where the researchers had used smell to manipulate a motion rather than the typical cognitive techniques that were popular during that time, and they gave a little biological evolutionary explanation which is something that I knew a lot about and I was definitely, and I am a devotee of evolutionary theory, and it just made this perfect sense to me, this connection between emotion and smell and something I’ve always been interested in also was memory, and I think I’m also a very sensual person and I always liked to touch stuff and smell things, I would drive my mother crazy, you know, walking around the kitchen doing that when I was little. And it just sort of fell together at that point, and I asked my graduate supervisor if I could work on this as a dissertation topic and he said, luckily he said, “Sure, if you want to, but I can’t help you”, and, you know, that was lucky for me ‘cause most dissertation advisers say, “Do what I do. You know, be a little clone of me”, and he just said, “You know, go ahead”, and I, in fact I’m Canadian and I, I was doing this at the university in Toronto and I found the very few people who are actually working on this field that were all in the US and I contacted them and I appeared on some of their doorsteps to their shock and learned what they did and then applied it to what I was interested in and the rest is history I guess, I got lucky.
Chip August: Well I suspect it’s more than luck. I think it’s a lot of hard work, and also I have to say you have a really engaging way of talking about what you do that, that just makes it really, really accessible, and I’m really, really pleased to have had you as a guest. If people want to get your book or they want to know a little bit more about you, do you have a website or something, a way that people can get in touch with you?
Dr. Rachel Herz: Sure. Well, I have a website which is rachelherz.com. I also have a website that’s scentofdesire.com and you can get my book on Amazon or it should be actually in any of your local bookstores from the independents to the big sellers like Barnes and Noble, so it should be, should be everywhere as my publicist tells me. So definitely you can, I mean it’ll probably be easiest place to find it if you can’t remember anything else is on Amazon, but Scent of Desire you can also see on my website.
Chip August: Now that’s all one word, scentofdesire, one word?
Dr. Rachel Herz: Yeah.
Chip August: Okay. And listeners, just so you know, we’ll also provide a link so that you can get to Rachel’s book if you want to, just by going to our website, www.personallifemedia.com. Also want to remind you if you want transcripts of this show or text and transcripts of any of our shows, just go to personallifemedia.com and you can find text and transcripts and information about all of the Personal Life Media shows. We, I like to ask my guests if they have an exercise or something that people can do at home that can enhance love, intimacy or sexuality, and most of my guests are, are more relationship experts, they’re not, you’re my first smell expert, but I understand you, you had an idea of an exercise that people can do at home, so could you share that with us?
Dr. Rachel Herz: Sure, well I thought of it after you told me to come up with something, so it’s not well practiced but you have told me that it’s actually something that other people use, and my idea was that you and your partner take turns blindfolding each other so the person who’s blindfolded is in a relaxed setting and then the person who doesn’t have a blindfold on gets to present them a variety of different things to smell, so it could be articles of clothing, could be body parts, could be food, and the person with the blindfold on should just be, you know, without any of the preconceived constructs what happen when we see things, just feeling and smelling and opening themselves up to that sensual aspect of themselves, as well as sort of, you know, experiencing whatever they can in an erotic way that this may bring up for them, and certainly food too which as you know has so much to do with smell and is I think also a very erotic and hedonistic stimulus, you can put things on each others lips, a finger in the mouth, etcetera, that, those sorts of things could also be built on from it. That I think would be quite nice to do.
Chip August: That sounds like a very fun way to spend an evening. That sounds like it could definitely lead to all kinds of exploration. It definitely sounds like fun. Dr. Herz, I want to thank you for being a guest on the show, you’ve been very, very entertaining and informative.
Dr. Rachel Herz: Thank you very much Chip for having me.
Chip August: And I want to thank the listeners for listening. If you have comments or would like to share some ideas for future shows, you can reach me by just sending an email to [email protected], that’s chip@personallifemedia, all one word, dot com. If you want to leave a voicemail for me you can call 206-350-5333. Please leave your name, leave my show name, Sex, Love and Intimacy and your question or your comment. You need to leave a phone number or an email and just know that when you leave a message on our voicemail system you indicate agreement that we can use that message on air if we would like to use that message on air. I think that’s pretty much, we’re pretty much out of time here, brings us to the end of our show, so I want to thank you for listening and join me again next time.