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For just a second, think about the word intimacy.

Now, how would you define it? The evolutionary biologist

Justin Garcia says, it's harder than it sounds. Intimacy is easy to talk about as a feeling.

It's harder to pin down as a scientific idea. But he says, it is something you can study,

something you can measure. In his new book, he says, intimacy is something you can study, something you can measure.

In his new book, he says, intimacy is feeling safe enough to lower your emotional armor and expose your deepest insecurities.

It's the experience of closeness, of feeling and being seen and heard and known.

And it's not abstract. It's a primal urge like the other primal

urge, the sex drive. Garcia says we have an intimacy drive. In his book, he writes about a

moment that seemed pretty close to evidence for this. Garcia is the director of the Kinsey

Institute. It's the research center that

studies human sexuality and relationships. And he had gone to Perump, Nevada to do some field research

at a brothel. The brothels in Perump are legal. It's not the easiest place to get to. You have to make a decision that you're going to spend

an afternoon going out there. And we had a tour from the folks who were there at this legal

brothel. It was a beautiful facility. It was clean. They were answering our questions. They knew we were a team of scientists.

And the woman who was giving us a tour had a little menu set up and talked us through the different kinds of things that people would come to this legal brothel for them.

Some of the things you might expect.

There were different kink-related exercises or activities you can engage in.

You could get an oil massage.

There were themed rooms and rules about hygiene for customers.

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