Is your internet history cluttered with website URLs resembling a multi-culture, multi-anatomy lexicon followed by multiple Xs that would frighten many and offend most? Do you find yourself hitting the incognito button at least once a day? Don't lie to yourself, you answered yes to both of these questions. We're not going to tell you what many therapists already haven't, you might suffer from a new illness called "Porn Brain".
Is your internet history cluttered with website URLs resembling a multi-culture, multi-anatomy lexicon followed by multiple Xs that would frighten many and offend most? Do you find yourself hitting the incognito button at least once a day? Don't lie to yourself, you answered yes to both of these questions. We're not going to tell you what many therapists already haven't, you might suffer from a new illness called "Porn Brain".
According to studies across the internet, between 68 percent and 100 percent of men look at porn online. A fact you probably already knew considering your collection of pre-programmed porn website domains you can access at any time or place. What you probably didn't know, is that everytime you're looking at a bunch of videos, pictures, gifs of whatever fetish you're into, your brain is releasing dopamine as if you were actually in those situations. This is the beginning of your long and arduous battle with porn addiction. Although most men or women don't suffer from porn addiction, a new German study tells us that it's not the addiction part we have to be worried about, but the "Porn Brain" result that occurs from watching to much porn. can be a more overarching prescription for what they actually do have. And if anyone knows porn, it's the Germans.
For the study, (Simone Kühn) and her colleague Jurgen Gallinat from Charite University, also in Berlin, recruited 64 healthy men between the ages of 21 and 45 years and asked them questions about their porn-watching habits. They also took images of the men’s brains to measure volume and to see how their brains reacted to pornographic pictures.
“We found that the volume of the so-called striatum, a brain region that has been associated with reward processing and motivated behavior was smaller the more pornography consumption the participants reported,” Kühn said. “Moreover we found that another brain region, that is also part of the striatum that is active when people see sexual stimuli, shows less activation the more pornography participants consumed,” she added.
What’s more, the researchers found that the connection between the striatum and prefrontal cortex, which is the outer layer of the brain associated with behavior and decision making, worsened with increased porn watching.
As noted above in the amount of males watching porn online, most men are generally susceptible "Porn Brain". But in all honesty, this study could apply to anything in massive amounts. Your brain can be transformed with many things in excess like surfing the internet, eating fast food or seeing your parents have sex. Which leads to the most fascinating, and important, part of the study, when the authors admit that the study is completely worthless.
Because the study can’t prove that porn caused the changes to the brain, Kühn said it’s not possible to say whether watching porn is actually harmful.
“Everything is going to be bad in excess and it’s probably not terrible in moderation,” Dr. Gregory Tau of the Columbia University / New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York said.
Tau, who was not involved with the study, agreed that more research should be done in this area and that longer studies would be need to find out if porn leads to brain changes.
“It is possible that there are individuals with a certain kind of brain that are more susceptible to these kinds of behaviors,” he said. “Or, it’s possible it’s the excessive use (of porn) that’s perpetuating itself to causing brain changes. Or, it could be both.”
Kühn said other behaviors, such as driving a taxi, are linked to changes to brain size and functioning.
“Basically everything that people do very frequently can shape their brain structure and function,” she said.
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