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Addiction/Brain Science

Porn Addiction Study Finds Astounding Results

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“An alarming number of boys, and now girls, could be a click away from addiction. A new study finds porn can affect your brain as much as drugs and alcohol and a new generation of kids has easier access to it than ever.”

Recently ABC Nightline aired a segment called The Teenage Brain on Porn highlighting the brain-changing (and brain-damaging) effects of consuming pornography. (ABC got some things right, but look for my scathing ninja rebuttal at the end of this post.)

valerie voon

The study was done by Valerie Voon, a lead researcher at Cambridge University. Twenty young men between the ages of 19 and 34, whose lives were controlled by porn, agreed to have their brains scanned while they viewed explicit pornographic images. A control group of men who did not use porn compulsively were shown the same images. The scans were done to see how their reward centers reacted. When the data was analyzed, the results were “astounding.” The reward centers of the compulsive users were twice as active as those in the control group; similar to the responses of drug and alcohol users.

Porn Preferred Over Real Sex

guy with a laptop

The Nightline piece interviewed several young people who couldn’t seem to stop their porn addiction. One young man in England admitted that he preferred masturbating to porn over real sex with a woman.

Norman Doidge, M.D., author of The Brain that Changes Itself, found the same thing happening in his clients. As their porn addiction altered their brains, they became less interested in real sex with real partners, even when they were readily available.

“The content of what they found exciting changed as the Web sites introduced themes and scripts that altered their brains without their awareness. Because plasticity is competitive, the brain maps for new, exciting images increased as the expense of what had previously attracted them—the reason, I believe, they began to find their girlfriends less of a turn-on.” (Doidge, The Brain the Changes Itself, p 109.)

My Scathing Ninja Rebuttal

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This leads us to “the answer” that Nightline came up with for addictions to hard core porn and the damage it does to the impressionable teenage concept of sex. Are you ready for it?

More porn!

Oh, but this is a kinder and gentler porn, showing people actually making love.

Seriously?

Let me de-bunk this right now. When people begin down the slippery slope of porn, especially kids with very vulnerable brains that are still wiring at a very fast pace, it won’t take long for this “Make Love Not Porn” to become boring. That’s just the nature of addiction. Shame on ABC for promoting more porn as the answer to porn addiction!

Looking at Computer Monitor

Again, Doidge sheds some light: “When pornographers boast that they are pushing the envelope by introducing new, harder themes, what they don’t say is that they must, because their customers are building up a tolerance to the content.” (Doidge, p. 105.)

A number of Doidge’s clients who were hooked on porn “reported increasing difficulty in being turned on by their actual sexual partners, spouses or girlfriends, though they still considered them objectively attractive. When I asked if this phenomenon had any relationship to viewing pornography, they answered that it initially helped them get more excited during sex but over time had the opposite effect.”

mom talking with 11 year old son

Let me end with some more clarity: Not only is porn a sick kind of fantasy; it erodes reality. It impacts the pleasure centers of the brain and alters them. Porn is the opposite of love. It isolates people and harms and destroys relationships.

Let us be clear with our kids: If they want a healthy, loving relationship as adults, they must avoid the lies and addictive nature of porn as kids.