Anywhere between 68 percent (according to Christian sources) and 100 percent of men (according to a study from The Telegraph, and reality) look at porn online. And, truth is, looking at pornography in excess isn't good for your brain.
While we may know ourselves to be smarter than our ancestors, our brains aren't too different than they were 100 or 500 years ago.
Take this recent German study that measured "Porn Brain." Say you look at ten pornography clips — your brain essentially thinks that you have slept with ten different women. Serious pornography addiction isn't a problem for most guys. But, like anything, it can lead to much more serious consequences. Like porn brain. Take a look:
For the study, (Simone Kühn) and her colleague Jurgen Gallinat from Charite University, also in Berlin, recruited 64 healthy men between the ages of 21 and 45 years and asked them questions about their porn-watching habits. They also took images of the men's brains to measure volume and to see how their brains reacted to pornographic pictures.
"We found that the volume of the so-called striatum, a brain region that has been associated with reward processing and motivated behavior was smaller the more pornography consumption the participants reported," Kühn said. "Moreover we found that another brain region, that is also part of the striatum that is active when people see sexual stimuli, shows less activation the more pornography participants consumed," she added.
What's more, the researchers found that the connection between the striatum and prefrontal cortex, which is the outer layer of the brain associated with behavior and decision making, worsened with increased porn watching.
If it sounds like pornography addiction is largely the same as Internet addiction, it's because it is. Anyone who has ever spent too much time online can attest to simply going through the motions, clicking from site to site and/or reloading Facebook or Twitter over and over just to see if anything has changed.
That has a lot to do with the basic reward system that we have in our brains. When we do something we percieve as pleasurable, our brain releases a small amount of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain that (basically) regulates pleasure. If a reward arrives predictably or too infrequently, we tend to lose interest. But if we anticipate the reward and control the frequency of how often we recieve the reward, our brains consistently release dopamine.
The above description is essentially a more scientific way of saying this: If you're looking at a boatload of porn in a short amount of time it is probably screwing with your mind. Like most any substance, our body can build up a tolerance for dopamine—and this leads to addiction. It works the same as heroin or chocolate: if you keep putting garbage into you, only garbage out will come out.
So you might have Porn Brain, or Internet Brain, or whatever you want to call it, but all of them come back to the same point: It pays to go outside and do something—or be with someone—real.
Let comedian Marc Maron have the final word here:
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