Watching Too Much Porn Reduces Grey Matter in the Brain: Study
Watching too much porn can reduce grey matter in men's brain, finds a study.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin found increased exposure to pornography can be bad for male brains. Their study involved 64 men aged between 21 and 45 who reportedly watched adult movies for at least four hours in a week. Experts also recorded brain activity and responses while the subjects viewed videos of sexual content along with other non-sexual images of people.
The scans revealed a decline in grey matter volume in lower striatum of the brain with regular exposure to pornographic images and movies. This brain area is related to motivation processing, controlling behavior during complex social interaction and motor skills.
"Our findings indicated that gray matter volume of the right caudate of the striatum is smaller with higher pornography use," wrote the authors in the study titled as "Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity Associated with Pornography Consumption", reports the New Zealand Herald.
The study explains regular porn viewers who have diminished volume of striatum, require external stimulation to feel pleasured and aroused thus leaving them addicted to porn. Earlier clinical trials suggest watching porn produces dopamine in the brain in amounts that are much higher than the quantity released during sexual activity. Men who become more dependent on visual medium to achieve arousal are more likely to lose interest in actual physical contact.
The current research was conducted to examine the impact of excessive consumption of sexually explicit content on decision making, attention span and memory. However, it did not find a cause- and-effect reaction. Therefore, the authors believe in investigating further.
"Future studies should investigate the effects of pornography longitudinally or expose naive participants to pornography and investigate the causal effects over time," they added, reports the Guardian.
More information is available online in JAMA Psychiatry.
May 30, 2014 09:34 AM EDT
