In the past few decades, the Internet has put everything under the sun within reach ... whenever we want it. We can binge-watch every season of Friends if we wanted to. We can have toilet paper shipped to our front door. We can find out how many teeth a shark has. (It has 5 rows of teeth totaling 3000. Do what you will with that information.)
And of course, we can watch pornography. Hours and hours of sexual images and videos involving (mostly) people in every imaginable combination and location, and some unimaginable ones, too. Never before in history have we had such infinite access to so much sexual stimuli.
When governments around the world put pandemic-related stay-at-home orders in place in March 2020, weekly visits went up sharply in all the affected countries and kept climbing for months.
When COVID-19 struck, we humans took porn consumption up a notch. All the social isolation and boredom drove people to porn on a scale never seen before. In 2019, Pornhub received a whopping 42 billion visits. But when governments around the world put pandemic-related stay-at-home orders in place in March 2020, weekly visits went up sharply in all the affected countries and kept climbing for months.
So, how does porn affect our brains? A 2014 study found that men who watched more porn had less gray matter volume—they literally had smaller brains. This finding caused a whirlwind of headlines and opinions. But is it true? What does it mean? Is porn really bad for us?
As usual, the answers are complicated. Let’s take a look at some interesting themes from neuroscience research on just how exactly pornography affects the way we see, think, feel, and act.
Brains on porn are different
One thing seems true: Brains on porn do appear to look and act somewhat differently. That infamous study from 2014? It found that the more porn men reported watching, the less volume and activity they had in the regions of the brain linked to reward processing and motivation, specifically the striatum.
They also found that connectivity between the striatum and the prefrontal cortex (which is the part of the brain used for decision making, planning, and behavior regulation) weakened the more porn the men reported watching. The researchers thought that, perhaps, we see these differences due to intense stimulation of the reward system, almost as if too much porn was wearing down this system and making it less sensitive.
This brain activity pattern looks awfully similar to the patterns in addiction.
Another...
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