Sexual tastes of vary from person to person. But with the current pornography
epidemic as some call it. One has to wonder how exactly this may effect our
desires and perception of sexuality. Moreover, how does it affect our sex
lives.
Pornography constitutes about twenty five percent of all search engine
requests, and is the fourth most common reason people give for going on the
internet. And well may seem to simply facilitate an instinctual sexual
response linked to millions of years of evolution. The truth is pornography has
dynamically changed over time ultimately molding our tastes and desires. The not so
shocking truth is that pornography has profound consequences for the brain and
acts in many ways like a drug.
With prolonged exposure your tolerance is increased and many often find themselves
addicted. Though it is not a physical substance, it leads to the same general loss of
control, the compulsiveness to seek out the activity despite negative
consequences
and withdrawl when it goes away. Much like that of gambling or running for example.
The issue is that continued exposure can cause long-term or even lifelong neuro-plastic
change in the brain. Dopamine is released as a reward whenever we
accomplish something whether it be eating to sustain life or sexual
activity to produce future life.
And this dopamine consolidates neural connections in order to drive us to
perform the same activity in the future. In other words, it alters and forms the
brain cells to motivate certain actions. It rewires your brain.
The national institutes of health measure drug addictiveness by testing
rats. The rat is trained to press a button in order to get a drug, and the harder it
works indicates how addictive the substance is. It turns out that the
more addictive a drug is the more to dopamine we see released.
And while there is unfortunately no rat porn that we can give to them, we do know that
dopamine is also released during sexual excitement which pornography plays right
into. The more time you spend doing it, the more dopamine gets released which
reinforces the behavior and makes you not only desire it in the future but
require it. And as you begin to imagine these images away from the computer or
while having sex, they become reinforced. Furthermore each orgasm releases even
more dopamine which consolidates the connections made during the session. It's
a feedback loop that becomes harder to escape and just like a drug your
tolerance for visual stimulation has now compounded, making it more difficult to be
turned on by reality. Pornography addiction can often lead to finding your
mate less attractive, the good news is it doesn't have to be permanent. Usually
when people understand the mechanism and realize it's affecting their
relationships, they can stop.
The brain is often described as a use it or lose it system because the neural
connections you stimulate grow stronger and desire to be activated while
the ones you ignore become weakened.
Much like your muscles which if sitting still all day itch for activity but
after prolonged non-use they become complacent. Luckily, because of this "use it
or lose it" brain, the same neuro-plastic system that proliferate these habits can
also be used to acquire healthier ones.
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