Miles Quaritch
Member
Thought this was interesting and worth sharing...
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/porn-on-the-brain
Episode will be available on demand a couple of hours after it airs.
Bonus article from The Guardian.
Brain scans of porn addicts: what's wrong with this picture?
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/26/brain-scans-porn-addicts-sexual-tastes
It's long but a highly recommended read.
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/porn-on-the-brain
As part of Channel 4's Campaign for Real Sex, Porn on the Brain is an authored film by journalist Martin Daubney, who walked away from his position as editor of lad's magazine Loaded after becoming a father.
His son is now four. Confused by alarming headlines and driven by the knowledge that his boy will soon reach the age at which most children first see porn (10 years), Martin wants to find some answers. Is porn really bad for kids? Where is the evidence?
While making the film, Martin discovers that porn has changed from what he remembers as a teenager. Today's hardcore porn is extreme; it's free and it's only one click away, and Martin is shocked by what he sees.
Martin meets internationally-renowned neuroscientists, leading therapists and educators who are all concerned about the effects on vulnerable teenage brains today of free and easy access to hardcore pornography.
The film includes the shocking results of a specially-commissioned survey of teen porn habits, conducted for the documentary by the University of East London; and collaborates with the University of Cambridge to conduct the first study of its kind, scanning the brains of men who feel they are addicted to porn.
Episode will be available on demand a couple of hours after it airs.
Bonus article from The Guardian.
Brain scans of porn addicts: what's wrong with this picture?
The Cambridge University neuropsychiatrist Dr Valerie Voon has recently shown that men who describe themselves as addicted to porn (and who lost relationships because of it) develop changes in the same brain area the reward centre that changes in drug addicts. The study, not yet published, is featured next week in the Channel 4 TV show Porn on the Brain. Neurosceptics may argue that pictures of the brain lighting up in addicts tell us nothing new we already know they are addicted. But they do help: knowing the reward centre is changed explains some porn paradoxes.
Once the reward centre is altered, a person will compulsively seek out the activity or place that triggered the dopamine discharge. (Like addicts who get excited passing the alley where they first tried cocaine, the patients got excited thinking about their computers.) They crave despite negative consequences. (This is why those patients could crave porn without liking it.) Worse, over time, a damaged dopamine system makes one more "tolerant" to the activity and needing more stimulation, to get the rush and quiet the craving. "Tolerance" drives a search for ramped-up stimulation, and this can drive the change in sexual tastes towards the extreme.
The most obvious change in porn is how sex is so laced with aggression and sadomasochism. As tolerance to sexual excitement develops, it no longer satisfies; only by releasing a second drive, the aggressive drive, can the addict be excited. And so for people psychologically predisposed there are scenes of angry sex, men ejaculating insultingly on women's faces, angry anal penetration, etc. Porn sites are also filled with the complexes Freud described: "Milf" ("mothers I'd like to fuck") sites show us the Oedipus complex is alive; spanking sites sexualise a childhood trauma; and many other oral and anal fixations. All these features indicate that porn's dirty little secret is that what distinguishes "adult sites" is how "infantile," they are, in terms of how much power they derive from our infantile complexes and forms of sexuality and aggression. Porn doesn't "cause" these complexes, but it can strengthen them, by wiring them into the reward system. The porn triggers a "neo-sexuality" an interplay between the pornographer's fantasies, and the viewer's.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/26/brain-scans-porn-addicts-sexual-tastes
It's long but a highly recommended read.