Your Brain on Porn (10 page)

When we make an artificial supernormal stimulus our top priority it's because it has triggered a

bigger blast of dopamine in our brain's reward circuit than its natural counterpart. For most users, yesteryear's porn magazines couldn't compete with real partners. A
Playboy
centrefold did not duplicate the other cues earlier porn users had learned to associate with real potential or actual partners: eye contact, touch, scent, the thrill of flirting and dancing, foreplay, sex and so forth.

Today's internet porn, however, is laced with supernormal stimulation. First, it offers endless novel hotties available at a click. Research confirms that anticipation of reward and novelty amplify one another to increase excitement and rewire the reward circuitry of the brain
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Second, internet porn offers countless artificially enhanced breasts and Viagra-sustained gargantuan penises, exaggerated grunts of desire, pile-driving thrusts, double or triple penetration, gang-bangs and other unrealistic scenarios.

Third, for most people, static images cannot compare with today's hi-def 3-minute videos of people engaged in intense sex. With stills of naked bunnies all you had was your own imagination.

You always knew what was going to happen next, which wasn't much in the case of a pre-internet 13-year old. In contrast, with an endless stream of ‘I can't believe what I just saw’ videos, your expectations are constantly violated (which the brain finds more stimulating).
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Keep in mind also, that humans evolved to learn by watching others doing things, so videos are more powerful ‘how to’

lessons than stills.

With science-fiction weirdness that would have made Tinbergen say, ‘I told you so’, today's porn

users often find internet erotica more stimulating than real partners. Users might not want to spend hours hunched in front of a computer staring at porn and compulsively clicking on new images. They might prefer to spend time socialising with friends and meeting potential partners in the process. Yet reality struggles to compete at the level of the brain's response, especially when one throws into the balance the uncertainties and reversals of social interaction. As Noah Church puts it in his memoir
Wack: Addicted to Internet Porn
, ‘it's not that I didn't want real sex, it's just that it was so much harder and more confusing to pursue than pornography.’ And this finds an echo in numerous first person accounts:

I went through a period of being single, stuck in a small town where there were very few

dating opportunities, and I began to masturbate frequently with porn. I was amazed at how
quickly I got sucked in. I began losing days of work surfing porn sites. And yet I didn’t fully
appreciate what was happening to me until I was in bed with a woman and caught myself
furiously trying to recall an exciting porn image in order to get hard. I did not imagine that it
could happen to me. Fortunately, I had a long foundation of healthy sex before porn and I
recognized what was going on. After I quit, I started getting laid again, and often. And shortly
after that I met my wife.

These days, there's no end of supernormal stimulation in sight. The porn industry already offers 3-D porn and robots
[65]
and sex toys synchronized with por
n[66]
or other computer users to simulate physical action.
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But danger lurks when something:

- registers as an especially ‘valuable’, that is, exaggerated version of a thing that our ancestors (and we) evolved to find irresistible (high-calorie food, sexual arousal),

- is available conveniently in limitless supply (not found in nature),

- comes in lots of varieties (abundant novelty),

- and we chronically overconsume it.

Cheap, plentiful junk food fits this model and is universally recognized as a supernormal stimulus.

You can slam down a 32-ounce soft drink and a bag of salty nibbles without much thought, but just try to consume their caloric equivalent in dried venison and boiled roots!

Similarly, viewers routinely spend hours surfing galleries of porn videos searching for the right video to finish, keeping dopamine elevated for abnormally long periods. But try to envision a hunter-gatherer routinely spending the same number of hours masturbating to the same stick-figure on a cave wall. Didn't happen.

Porn poses unique risks beyond supernormal stimulation. First, it's easy to access, available 24/7, free and private. Second, most users start watching porn by puberty, when their brain's are at their peak of plasticity and most vulnerable to addiction and rewiring.

Finally, there are limits on food consumption: stomach capacity and the natural aversion that kicks in when we can't face one more bite of something. In contrast, there are
no
physical limits on internet porn consumption, other than the need for sleep and bathroom breaks. A user can edge (masturbate without climaxing) to porn for hours without triggering feelings of satiation, or aversion.

Bingeing on porn feels like a promise of pleasure, but recall that the message of dopamine isn't ‘satisfaction’. It's, ‘keep going, satisfaction is j-u-s-t around the corner’:

I would arouse myself close to orgasm then stop, keep watching porn, and stay at medium

levels, always edging. I was more concerned with watching the porn than getting to orgasm.

Porn had me locked in focus until eventually I was just exhausted and orgasmed out of
surrender.

Unwanted Adaptation: Sexual Conditioning and Addiction

What’s a brain to do when it has unlimited access to a superstimulating reward it never evolved

to handle? Some brains adapt – and not in a good way. The process is gradual. At first, using porn and masturbating to orgasm resolves sexual tension and registers as satisfying.

But if you chronically overstimulate yourself, your brain may start to work against you. It protects itself against excessive dopamine by decreasing its responsiveness to it, and you feel less and less gratified
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This decreased sensitivity to dopamine pushes some users into an even more determined search for stimulation, which, in turn, drives lasting changes, actual physical alterations of the brain. They can be challenging to reverse. As one user said, ‘Porn goes in like a needle but comes out like a fishhook.’

Sexual Conditioning

One possible outcome is unanticipated sexual conditioning – which didn't happen to your father

when he used
Playboy
. Perhaps you wire your sexual excitement to a screen, constant novelty, voyeurism or bizarre acts. Worst case, you eventually need both porn's content and delivery-at-a-click to sustain arousal.

Before I quit I had the utmost trouble getting off. I actually had to close my eyes and
imagine a CONSTANT stream of porn to climax. I was more or less using my girlfriends'

bodies to help me jerk off. After a long streak without porn, I could climax easily, without
thinking about it. It was a miracle. It was the best feeling ever.

Most news stories about youthful porn use focus on conscious learning. The assumption is that all we need to tell teens is that porn isn't like real sex and all will be well.
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This remedy ignores the
unconscious
effects of porn viewing.

At the same time young Jamie is consciously learning that women ‘love’ ejaculate on their faces,

he may unconsciously be learning that ejaculating on women's faces is sexually arousing. This kind of

unconscious learning happens to some degree every time he finds porn exciting.
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Of course, what turns Jamie on at 14 may bear no relation to what he's watching at 16. He may have graduated to femdom or incest porn.

Superficial conditioning (or learning) can be summed up as, ‘So this is how people have sex and

this is how
I
should do it.’ Unconscious sexual conditioning can be summed up as, ‘This is what turns me on’ or, at a brain level, ‘This is what jacks up my dopamine’. It could be as simple as preferring redheads. Or maybe dainty feet or pecs appeal more than breasts.

However our preferences arise, our brains evolved to record what turns us on. This phenomenon

rests on a crucial neural principle:
Nerve cells that fire together wire together
. Briefly, the brain links together the nerve cells for sexual excitement (in the reward circuit) with the nerve cells that store memories of the events associated with the excitement. For example, type in your favourite porn site and you activate nerve cells that blast your reward circuitry. Up goes your dopamine.

Brains are plastic, and once you wire up a new cue you have no way of knowing when it will trigger a future reaction. Much as Pavlov's dog learned to salivate to the bell, today's porn users learn to wire unexpected stimuli to their erections. The brain's primitive reward circuitry isn't aware that the bell isn't food, or that the novel porn isn't ‘my’ porn. Its axiom is simply ‘Dopamine
good
’.

In 2004 Swedish researchers found that 99% of young men had consumed pornography. That's ancient history in terms of porn's delivery, yet more than half felt it had had an impact on their sexual

behaviour.
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Even if you're watching tame porn and haven't developed any porn-induced fetishes, the issue of

how
you get your jollies can have repercussions. If you use internet porn, you may be training yourself for the role of voyeur or to need the option of clicking to something more arousing at the least drop in your dopamine, or to search and search for just the right scene for maximum climax. Also, you may be masturbating in a hunched-over position – or watching your smartphone in bed nightly.

Each of these cues, or triggers, can now light up your reward circuit with the promise of sex ...

that isn't sex. Nevertheless, nerve cells may solidify these associations with sexual arousal by sprouting new branches to strengthen connections. The more you use porn the stronger the nerve connections can become, with the result that you may ultimately
need
to be a voyeur,
need
to click to new material,
need
to climax to porn to get to sleep, or
need
to search for the perfect ending just to get the job done.

A prime evolutionary task of adolescence is learning all about sex – both consciously and unconsciously. To accomplish this, the highly malleable adolescent brain wires to sexual cues in the environment. Novel, startling, arousing stimuli can rock an adolescent's world in a way it won't an adult brain, and this showed up in the brain scans of young porn users in the recent Cambridge study.