You’ve heard the scaremongering tales about the perils of excessive masturbation, and the warnings about the “addictive” power of smartphones and the internet. Put them together and what do you get? Drum roll please: watching too much porn can actually shrink your brain! You may dismiss this as just another moral panic, but there’s more real science behind this idea than you might think. So buckle up, as we try to figure out whether an affinity for erotica could spell trouble for the old gray cells.
The brain on porn
The study that really kicked all this off came out in 2014, in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Psychiatry. Study authors Simone Kühn and Jürgen Gallinat recruited 64 adult men and questioned them about their porn habits before scanning their brains. The justification for only including men was given as: “men are exposed to pornography at a younger age, consume more pornography, and are more likely to encounter problems compared with women.”
On average, the group reported spending 4.09 hours per week engaging with pornographic material, but there was a lot of variation. Twenty-one of the participants were classed as “at risk of internet sex addiction”. But it was in the results of the brain scans that things began to get interesting.
The study found that the men who spent the most time watching porn tended to have less gray matter in the right striatum. The porn connoisseurs also showed less functional activation in the left striatum when they were shown explicit images, and they had fewer connections between the right striatum and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
The striatum has a number of roles, but the one that’s most relevant to this study is the part it plays in the brain’s reward circuitry, and the consequent involvement it’s thought to have in addiction. Kühn and Gallinat had originally hypothesized that consuming porn might have some parallels with addictive behaviors, and that they might therefore see changes in the reward network.
“Taken together,” they concluded, “one may be tempted to assume that the frequent brain activation caused by pornography exposure might lead to wearing and downregulation of the underlying brain structure.” As Wired reported at the time, this was enough for a slew of alarmist headlines about the brain-shrinking effects of pornography.
However, it was the part just after that sentence in the paper that arguably should have got a bit more attention: “the observed volumetric association with [time spent watching porn] in the striatum could likewise be a precondition rather than a consequence of frequent pornography consumption.” In other words, natural differences in some individuals’ brains might cause them to find porn more rewarding, and therefore make them more likely to seek it out.
As Kühn told Reuters, “Basically everything that people do very frequently can shape their brain structure and function.” And as Christian Jarrett pointed out in the piece for Wired, the participants in the study had been carefully screened beforehand, and all of them were physically and psychologically healthy.
So, if these men were able to consume as much porn as they fancied with seemingly no ill effects, and if it’s impossible to tell whether their brain differences were caused by the habit, was this all just a fuss about nothing? Or is “porn addiction” really something we should worry about?
Can you become addicted to porn?
Many people are convinced that porn addiction is a real and pressing problem. Some have gone so far as to recommend complete abstinence – one part of the extremely online “No Fap” anti-masturbation movement seeks to cure this perceived addiction, although a recent study found some notable downsides to the practice.
UK-based relationship counseling provider Relate lists porn addiction among the difficulties its professionals can help with. “It can have a pronounced effect on your sex and romantic life – very often coming to replace or interfere with your desire for intimacy in the ‘real world’,” it says. “Some people start to engage in risky behaviours too – watching porn at work or in public.”
While pornography is something many people enjoy, and can absolutely be part of a perfectly healthy lifestyle, a porn habit that interferes with your relationships or other activities might well be a reason to seek professional help. But does this truly qualify as an “addiction”?
This is something that’s been disputed within the psychology and psychiatry communities. Pornography addiction is not currently recognized as a standalone mental health disorder by the American Psychological Association, similar to so-called sex addiction. There’s a growing body of literature that uses an umbrella term, compulsive sexual behavior disorder (CSBD), to encompass compulsive, impulsive, and addictive behaviors around sex, which may include pornography. However, this term is far from being broadly accepted.
All of this doesn’t mean that excessive porn consumption can’t have an impact on mental health, or – crucially for our question – the brain itself.
A 2021 study looked at the impact of porn specifically on the mental health of college students. The results indicated a relationship between porn consumption and negative mental health outcomes, and the authors stressed the need for further research in this area. A 2022 review summarized current research into the effects of compulsive behaviors around sex and porn on the brain, again highlighting the involvement of addiction-associated brain circuits.
What’s the outlook?
Internet porn is an inescapable feature of 21st-century life. In the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, with all of the societal shifts it wrought in our working and socializing routines, people may well be reevaluating their own porn consumption habits.
Psychologists’ understanding of how behaviors can morph into something like an addiction is still fairly limited, and a lot more neurobiological research is needed before we can confidently make claims like “watching a lot of porn gives you ‘pea’ brain”. However, we also can’t ignore the many anecdotal reports of the damage that self-perceived porn addiction has done to people’s lives.
As recently as this week, the first ever pilot study of a specific porn addiction treatment program received ethical approval in the UK. Away from the hyperbole, the work of clinicians and researchers in this area will continue to unpick this complex issue. One day, we may know for sure whether that daily visit to PornHub could be leaving its mark on the very structure of your brain.
Source Link: Does Watching A Lot Of Porn Give You “Pea” Brain?
