Porn A public health issue

Porn has been exposed to the British population from ages as young as eight. And with the latest technological advances it is easier to view porn than to fetch a glass of water. A few clicks on your phone, and a Colosseum of exploitation and violence will be there in front of your naked eyes within seconds. In this week’s post, we consider how porn can have a severe impact upon your brain and how it can lead to both physical and social problems.


Neuroplasticity,  this is when our brain grows and rewires as we grow and change, creating new pathways, weakening old pathways, (learning – rewiring). The pathways are competitive, so imagine yourself having two pathways: one for porn, and one for sexual intimacy. As the usage of porn increases, that pathway becomes stronger and you become conditioned to be less shocked by the visuals of porn. As a result, the pathway of real sexual intimacy decreases, rewiring your pathway and becoming less and less connected to real life sex.
When it comes to real sex, the effect of porn makes you desire it over a real relationship itself and rules over your innate biological mechanisms. The continuous high sparks of dopamine released by your brain when you view porn, happens to be stronger and more “satisfying” to your reward system then the dopamine released with your human partner. As a result, many find porn more satisfying and allow it to take over the real-life relationships leading to unhealthy distortions of reality and possible physical and psychological -erectile dysfunction (which many porn users have said to experienced due to neuroplasticity). Stopping the view of porn, allows time for the real pathway to construct itself back, and recover from damage caused to yourself.
Brain Function
Think about a drug for example, cocaine.  And you approach someone who is an addict. You show them a picture, or photo of the cocaine, their brain process this information and from their resting metabolic rate, rapid increase in metabolic rate would arise ( due to increase in dopamine). But this would not happen to a normal person who is a non-addict.  The answer … Sensitisation!
Strengthening of a neurological response to a stimulus.  In relation to porn, sensitization is the brains mechanism of reinforcing a behaviour in order to attain reward – dopamine spike. When you view porn, an increase in dopamine level acts as a reward and tells the brain what you are doing or partaking in is good, very good in fact as it causes high levels of dopamine (excitement) to arise. So when you use internet porn, your brain conditions the characteristics of the environment in which you view porn, as ques for your dopamine reward. Examples of these could include – opening up a private browser window, sitting at home alone (where the opportunity to watch porn has no bounds), opening up your laptop with your doors closed, Anything! All of which leads you to your reward dopamine. Two studies at Cambridge University on July 2014 and  August 2014 studying 19 healthy controlled men to 19 compulsive porn users monitored the brains activity of the men when showed pornographic content, and it was found that the healthy controlled groups reward circuit lighted up, but the porn users circuits lighted up more than twice the amount compared to the control group. This therefore indicates that porn users subjectively have an extreme increase in craving and desires –what is normally seen by drug addicts.

Addiction/Desensitization
What is an addiction – the bmj (British medical journal) classifies addiction as a condition “involving use of a substance… in which a person has strong cravings, is unable to stop or limit the activity, continues the activity despite harmful consequences …”  whereas according to the American Society of addiction Medicine, addiction is – “ a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry”. Desensitisation: the addicts get sensitised to their addictions but desensitized to everything else… not everything is as exciting and thrilling as the session of dopamine-the highlight of the day. Therefore, through pornography your everyday activities such as doing your homework, going out with mates, even socially interacting with others become boring and you slowly begin to withdraw from daily activity’s – under the pull of porn.


 Structure of the Brain
Brain structure associated with pornography consumption - Simone Kühn, PhD , Jürgen Gallinat, a study from the Max Plank institution in Germany, published at the American Medical  Association of psychiatry. Procedure- 64 healthy adult’s males who viewed a wide range of pornography consumption over one week – reported the hours of pornography they had been exposed to.  Findings – Dorsal Striatum (associated with the reward and control system) atrophy. The dorsal striatum which regulates the reward pathway of the human brain via transport of dopamine through the mesolimbic dopamine system, which controls and individual’s response to natural stimuli (such as sex, food, and social interactions) had been identified to have decreased in size - in other words shrunk. Due to the shrinkage of dorsal striatum being identified via MRI scans, it is evident that viewing of porn can disturb and disturb our brains to an extend which can influence our relationships eating habits and personal lives to a great extent my changing our brain physically.


It is evident that porn is damaging and disturbing to our minds and how  the impacts it has on our brain is concerning-especially with young developing minds becoming addicted and hooked on it. As important as it is to consider what we put into our bodies and how nurture ourselves, it is even more important to be cautious of what we put into our minds. As Marc Lewis- a former drug addict and now a neuroscientist at the Radbound University in Nejmegen in Netherlands states in his book, dopamine is “like a powerful microscope” which can negatively change our perception of reality and other members of the public.

Thank you for Reading, by Mathew George (Universal Medicine team)

Resources:

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/27/31/8161
http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/1874574
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7E0mTJQ2KM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEUxKFmIUiI
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3050060/
http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?c=UNIVERSITY&playItem=PL15H01
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhkRbsmCv1s

Comments

  1. RandomGuy18 March 2017 at 14:28

    Wow this is really good. Mad ting! Helped me with life yunno and dat.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown21 March 2017 at 17:16

    This is acc amazing!! Helped me a lot!!����

    ReplyDelete
  3. Martin_Gatev20 May 2017 at 21:27

    This is an excellent article man, everything seems so well researched! I have to point you to this though https://youtu.be/FZePzpOPW00, I think in both places you pretty much say the same thing - science doesn't lie!

    Thank you for writing that!

    ReplyDelete

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