The sex addiction debate rages on.
And that's not the only thing that's raging on, ya feel me?
No you don't.
Hi folks, Laci Green here and you're watching Dnews.
At the very beginning of Dnews, back when we were just a fetus, I did a video on sex
addiction and whether or not it's a real disorder.
If you remember those days, you get a gold star.
Now, I'll let you watch that video if you're interested, but today, I'm talking about a
new study, one of the first of its kind, that shifts that debate.
There's always a new study up in here isn't it?
The sex addiction study was published in the journal of Sociaffective Neuroscience & Psychology,
and it looked at 52 men and women who have trouble controlling their porn usage.
The researchers hooked them up to an EEG and monitored the neurons firing in their brains
while they various images.
The images were divvied up into a few categories.
There were pleasant sexual, pleasant non-sexual, neutral, and unpleasant images.
The study closely replicates how drug addiction has been researched around the world.
People addicted to alcohol, cocaine, heroine, that kind of thing.
In an addict, their brain gets all weird and nutty when they're shown a visual stimuli
of their addiction.
So that's what the researchers expected to see if the sexy pics were to trigger addictive
impulses.
But that's not what they saw.
The EEG graphs came in and there's nothing particular or special of the brain's response
to the images.
The neuro activity didn't look like what you would expect to see of someone who is an addict.
It was no different than someone who has a high libido.
So, that's an interesting thingy.
Does this mean that sex addiction has been debunked for good and we can wave it bye bye?
Not quite.
The study will need to be repeated and other research teams will need to get the same results
independently before that's on the table.
But this is a significant step.
The researchers say these results alter our understanding of what we're calling a sex
addiction.
Possibly reframing it as an unusually high libido.
Which is an important difference.
If it's a psychological addiction, that changes the way we see normal sexuality.
It changes treatment options and how it's classified in the DSM.
And FYI, the new DSM refrained from a yay or nay on sex addiction as a disorder because
they say it needs more research.
What's surprising to me is that, in all this hubbub about sex addiction in the past 25
years, nobody thought, "Hey guys, maybe we should actually try to study this."
Science, people.
It helps you learn a thing.
If this is all very confusing for you and you're like, "Laci I have no idea what's going
on!
Where am I?
What's sex addiction?"
Just, shhhhh.
Watch my other video.
It's all going to be okay.
Thanks for watching Dnews guys.
We'll be back soon cause we update twice a day.
I'll see you then.