The researchers have witnessed newspapers spread headlines of brain shrinkage and brain harm, and yet they know that they specifically recruited psychologically and neurologically healthy men. Moreover, by also neglecting to measure any other media consumption, then even if before/after evidence were available, we wouldn't know if it were due to porn consumption or to other media activities correlated with that porn use, such as watching violent movies and online gambling (to be fair, the findings did still hold after the researchers controlled for overall levels of internet use). By failing to follow up participants over time, the research also provides no evidence that watching porn has any effects whatsoever. And we already know that key personality traits such as extraversion and sensation seeking are linked with distinct patterns of brain structure and response. The men's self-reported time spent watching porn is little more than a rough proxy for their personality profile, including their willingness to diverge details about their private habits. Still further research has shown how extraverts, and those more open to experience, are more persuaded by advertising that uses sexual imagery.īy failing to measure or control for personality, the results of this study are virtually meaningless. Other research has documented differences in resting-state brain activity according to personality. Past research has already shown that high sensation seekers have reduced sensitivity to high arousal pictures (including nudity and gore). Had they done so, they would likely have found strong associations between personality and brain structure and function.
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Also, the more avid porn viewers showed less activation in their left striatum when they looked at racy images, and they appeared to have reduced connectivity between their right striatum and their left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.Īmazingly, although Kühn and Gallinat checked their participants were free from depression and addiction, they otherwise failed to measure their participants' personality traits. In other words, men who said they spent more time watching porn tended to have a smaller amount of grey matter in this part of their brain. The researchers found that hours spent watching porn was negatively correlated with the amount of grey matter in a subcortical region near the front of the brain - the right striatum - that's known to be involved in the processing of reward (as well as lots of other things). They averaged four hours per week, and none of them met the criteria for Internet sex addiction according to the "Internet Sex Screening Test". The men also answered questions about how much porn they watch. The third scan looked at brain activity while the men relaxed in the scanner for five minutes (a so-called resting-state scan). The second looked at patterns of brain activation when the men viewed sexual or neutral images. The first scan was a simple structural brain scan. So if they had shrunken brains (we'll come onto that later), it wasn't causing them any major problems. In fact, all the men who participated were free from any psychiatric or neurological disorders. They scanned the brains of 64 healthy men (average age 29) in three ways. The study that triggered all this concern was published by a German pair: Simone Kühn, a psychologist, and Jürgen Gallinat, a psychiatrist. The claim arrives courtesy of a brain imaging paper published last month in JAMA Psychiatry, a respected medical journal.Īmong the global hyperbolic headlines that followed, my favourite was from a German site: " Pea brain: watching porn online will wear out your brain and make it shrivel." Others included " Viewing porn shrinks the brain" (from the reliably untrustworthy Daily Mail) and Watching Porn Linked To Less Gray Matter In The Brain (from Huffington Post). Today, we're told that watching moderate amounts of pornography will shrink your brain. A hundred years ago they said that masturbating would make you go blind.