Guests: Pooja Lakshmin, MD
On this Couch Talk, Dr. Anna and Dr. Pooja Lakshmin discussed how how stress, anxiety, trauma and depression all take a major toll on our brain and hormones and how one simple and quite enjoyable technique can make a major difference! The one special technique is scientifically proven, involves no drugs and allows us to reconnect and revive our relationships with others and our self!
Listen to the podcast with Dr. Pooja Lakshmin
Meet Pooja Lakshmin, MD
Pooja graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Arts in Neuroscience and Women’s studies. During that time she did clinical research at the sleep and chronobiology laboratory at the hospital of the university of Pennsylvania. She went on to study medicine at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, where she earned her MD. She moved to California in 2010 for her Psychiatry residency training at Stanford hospital, where she worked on inpatient acute psychiatric units & outpatient clinics with patients who suffered from severe mental illness, including working with patients with addiction & trauma. She received extensive training in psychopharmacology as well as various therapy modalities. She left Stanford in 2012 to do neuroscience research at Rutgers University in New Jersey and is now working at the Orgasm lab with expert neuroscientist Barry Komisaruk PhD, where they are using fMRI technology to map the sensory pathways of the female genitalia in the brain and nervous system as well as to establish the sequence of brain activity during orgasm and orgasmic meditation. Her clinical interests lie in treating women who suffer from trauma, PTSD, chronic genital pain & low sex drive.
Dr Pooja’s Research
At Rutgers University we are researching orgasm in the brain and how it effects the nervous system as a whole, through functional MRI imaging technology. We are looking at how the body processes genital sensation & the mapping the pathways in the brain.
Specifically, I’m interested in the role of the limbic system which processes sensation, emotions, and experiential memory, as well as the neural pathways, and oxytocin's role in the brain.
We are looking at the role of the somatosensory cortex & the limbic structures like the Insula and amygdala – which get activated in orgasm and also process pain. I am interested In the potential clinical applications of this as well – especially for chronic pain conditions & trauma.
We are also looking at the involuntary components. Orgasm activates your autonomic or visceral nervous system and we are studying how this activation works to balance the nervous system as a whole by measuring things like heart rate variability or vagal tone in the parasympathetic system, and how this leads to optimum functioning.
