Research Reveals Watching Porn Regularly Affects Your Brain Deeply and Causes Addiction
Millions of men and women around the globe watch porn on a regular basis without giving a second thought and questioning how their habit may indeed affect their brain. Although viewers do not seem to worry much about how porn consumption influences the human brain, scientists wanted to investigate the effects of this multi-billion dollar industry on human mind.
Various studies investigated the subject over the years and many of those revealed important findings. For instance, a study published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2014 showed that viewing porn regularly may leave a person desensitized to sexual stimulation over time.
Watching porn, as well as having sex, makes your body release a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which is associated with pleasure and reward. But regular viewing and pushing dopamine levels too high frequently makes your brain not feel the same "high" with the same level of stimulation any more. In other words, in order to get the same amount of pleasure, you would have to watch more porn, which creates a vicious cycle, Daily Mail reported.
Another study from Germany found out that frequent exposure to porn creates individuals who are not capable of getting excited by ordinary sexual experiences and start craving for more extreme experiences. Another interesting finding by the same study was that researchers discovered porn may actually shrink your brain, more specifically brain's part associated with motivation and reward response.
A Cambridge study from 2013 also brought an interesting finding to the table. Researchers discovered that porn addicts had the same part of the brain light up when shown pornographic images as drug addicts do when exposed to drugs. These findings suggest that porn addiction has a similar pattern with other type of addiction such as drug and alcohol addiction, Daily Mail reported.
