The hidden effects of pornography: Nowadays, I get a lot of questions about pornography. And the discussion around pornography is always related to the discussion around masturbation. But let’s talk about pornography for a moment in this context of these primitive drives and these circuits within the hypothalamus, which we were all born with, that clearly some of them are devoted to our progression as a species through reproduction. Zero questions about that. Sexual behavior is linked to reproduction. Not always, but certainly, we can all agree on that. It’s a necessary precondition. I hope we can still all agree on that. But last time I checked, that’s still true. A sperm and an egg met somewhere in some context to create all of us. We’re still grounded in that. Pornography is something that I hear quite a lot from typically young males.
But sometimes young females, or even older females, say that they can see themselves trying to resist the desire to go look at it. And it almost doesn’t feel like a desire anymore. They’re sort of just in a kind of a compulsion that is almost unconscious, but they’re just aware of the fact that they’re – Like an eating disorder. Like an eating disorder. They’re doing it. They know they shouldn’t be doing it, and they can’t help themselves. And we could think about two ways to attack this if one believes it’s a real problem. And they certainly do, so I do. I would be open if I had or do. Pornography has not been my thing, and I don’t struggle with it.
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But when I hear from these people, it’s so clear that they’re asking, is it the prevalence of pornography out there? Or is it something really broken in them? Like, are they broken? But I don’t know that I would say, after having the discussion we’ve had thus far, that they’re broken. It seems like, as you said, it’s the manifestation of one part of them. It’s one personality within them. Well, and it’s been compulsively rewarded. So, when you see yourself moving towards the culmination of a desired goal, dopamine, that’s accompanied by dopamine release, okay? And so two things. You know this, but everybody who’s listening might not. There are two elements to that dopamine release. One is pleasure, but the other is dopamine; imagine that there are circuits activated.
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As you’re acting, what the dopamine does is increase the probability that the circuits that were activated just before the positive experience happened to grow. Okay, so now if you’re engaged with pornography, and that culminates in successful sexual satiation, which it can; that’s what masturbation does, then the whole personality that’s oriented toward that set of stimuli is going to come to dominate. It’s very much like an addiction, except it’s. You know, there has been, there’s been work done with generally simpler animals on these phenomena called super stimuli. I think it’s stickleback fish where this was first observed. So, males, I hope I get this right, but I’ve got it approximately right. I believe it’s male sticklebacks will, they’re very aggressive towards other male sticklebacks.
And the reason they’re aggressive is because the other male sticklebacks have a red dot on their bellies. So they don’t like red dots. They don’t like red dots at all. And so you could really enrage a stickleback with a red dot. And if you use a red dot that’s a little bigger and a little brighter than the typical red dot, you get a super stimulus. It’s virtually irresistible to the stickleback. And it’s weird because the maximal activation is produced by a stimulus that they wouldn’t see in nature. It slightly exceeds; that’s exactly what pornography does. It’s a super stimulus. Right? And it’s not surprising that young males, in particular, are susceptible to that because male sexuality in human beings is very visually oriented, very.
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And a lot of our brain is visual, way more than virtually every other animal, certainly every other primate and every other mammal. And so we have a situation where any 13-year-old boy can see more hyper-attractive super-stimulus women in one day than the most successful man who ever lived a hundred years ago would have ever seen in his whole life. Yeah. Well, that’s like an evolutionary ecological, radical ecological transition. And the, and it’s worse because it’s easily accessible. So it takes no work. So not only is it a super stimulus, it’s at hand, so to speak. And the, uh, and the, uh, the analog in the food world would be highly palatable, highly processed food. Yeah. Sugar-fat combination. You go into it.
The other day, I went into a gas station to use the restroom because I was traveling home for Thanksgiving, and I looked around and thought this wasn’t a convenience store. This is a pharmacy. Everything that had chocolate also seemed to have caffeine and color; everything, every drink, seemed to combine not just sugar but also caffeine and some other things that would provide stimulants. Then you’ve got nicotine and drinks, and these things, on their own, aren’t necessarily bad. Any one of these elements in low, low enough doses in frequent use, et cetera. But maybe sugar is the one that, that clearly I think, uh, deserves, um, deeper investigation. Right. Um, but it just occurred to me that. It’s different than the difference between manufacturing sugar and manufacturing cocaine.
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You take something available in its natural form in relatively low concentrations and purify it. I mean, coca leaves, the natives used coca leaves forever as a mild stimulant, didn’t seem to cause them any trouble, but that’s way different than cocaine. And sugar has the same, arguably the same pathological properties. Well, I didn’t think we were going to go here, but it’s extremely appropriate and important that we do. So. So, you followed what is essentially an elimination diet for a number of years. You eat meat. All right. Um, I eat meat, vegetables, fruit, and, um, some starches, unrefined starch in any event. One thing that I think is absolutely clear from following a clean diet, so to speak, of any kind, but let’s say of the sort that you follow or I follow, that you very soon learn the relationship between the taste of the food, the volume of the food;
macronutrient, so protein, fat, or carbohydrate content, micronutrients and satiation, which is, if you think about it, sort of like a big plate of broccoli or a big steak or something, the brain learns and the hypothalamus learns the association between the taste, the caloric content, what else is in there and satiation. If you think about highly processed food or even combinations of multiple ingredients, that’s absolutely impossible to do; the brain can’t parse. What are the various things in here and how do they relate to my feelings of satisfaction? It’s the difference between a super drug and what I believe are the elements that were, that we have-Explain why you think that link about satiation can’t be learned in the case of these processed foods.
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Yeah, because in the context of these processed foods, they’re activating multiple neuron systems in the hypothalamus and gut. We know that the gut has neurons that can respond to sugar, fatty acids, and amino acid content. There’s this prominent theory that one of the main reasons we eat is to forage for amino acids that we’ll eat until we get enough of the essential amino acids. We correlate that with taste, but that the gut has neurons where we know the gut has neurons that signal through the vagus up through a little relay called the nodose ganglion, if you want to look at it, fun name, and then up to the dopaminergic centers of the brain, which make us, oh, when we eat something that has a high essential amino acid content like a steak, like a really tasty steak.
The neurons in the gut, in a way that is independent of taste, are signaling to the brain, ah, I’m getting essential amino acids. You should eat more of this thing. If those, let’s say, a small fraction of those amino acids that are present in a candy bar or in a package of Skittles, which I’m guessing there are very few of them, if any, you’re going to continue to forage for food because those neurons will also respond to sugar. It will keep you eating until you get enough of those amino acids. In other words, there are two parallel tracks. One within our taste. Multiple pathways to satiation. Right. Totally right. Multiple pathways to satiation. One is dependent on taste. Of course. One dependent on actual nutrient content. The mouth can only learn taste association.
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The mouth can’t actually learn nutrient content. The gut knows nutrient content. The problem is that you take a food that is low in a micronutrient or macronutrient es, essential amino acids or essential fatty acids. After all, there are no essential carbohydrates. There are only essential amino acids and essential fatty acids. Right, right, right. And it will keep you eating. And it will keep the appetite system running. And it will keep you thriving until you get enough of those. Now, here’s the issue. If you’ve ever done this, it’s probably been-So that’s empty calories. Empty calories. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So, in some ways, you know, this again is an analog to the whole discussion around pornography, masturbation, and reproduction, right? I’m not saying that reproduction is the all and all of sexual activity, but in the evolutionary sense, it absolutely is, right?
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There’s no question about that. There’s no moral judgment there. That’s just the reality. So the situation with food is the following. If we are eating without any gut-level understanding of what’s coming in, we will keep eating. If you let me give an example, you probably haven’t done this experiment in a while, but if you’ve ever just had ribeye steak or two, it’s pretty satiating. You could also have a salad if you’re me or some broccoli or something like that. If one takes then, even after you’ve eaten all that, one bite of pasta, one bite of pasta, the next impulse is more, right? Right? Yes. It’s from those steaks. You’re losing, you know, a threshold, you’ve reached that, et cetera, all of that good stuff. Why?
Because blood glucose goes up and then you desire more because blood glucose elevations are linked directly to the dopaminergic system. So what I’m trying to say here is that there are elements to our food, modern food, if you will. It seems like it’s, you know, anything but modern in the sense that it’s worse for us than the more primitive foods, but highly processed foods, pornography, any drug that spikes dopamine dramatically, like methamphetamine, for instance. Any behavior that spikes dopamine dramatically very quickly hijacks these circuits. And to me, the way to teach those circuits a calmer, more prudent version of themselves, right? To enter a different hypothalamic activation pattern is to start breaking things down into their essential elements.
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About the motivation, the pleasure, et cetera, to tamp all that down. I mean, we know that for pornography. If the pornography is very extreme, then less extreme pornography doesn’t seem to work. Well, that’s because there’s also a novelty kick in dopaminergic striving, right? I mean, so with any basic appetitive pleasure, there’s a dopaminergic kick. But with any novelty, there’s also a dopaminergic kick. So, there’s an optimized threshold for novelty and appetitive striving that plays out in pornography. Mm-hmm. So. Um. There’s the direct effect of the stimulus as such. But there’s variation in the stimulus that’s also novel. And so, it’s a common pattern for pornographic usage to become more fetishistic. That’s one way of thinking about it as it progresses because that keeps the novelty alive. Right. That’s very dangerous.
That’s a very dangerous development. Right. And I would venture into a very different domain if you were to eat your steak slathered in barbecue sauce for a couple of weeks, going back to the way that you eat them now, which, by the way, is a great opportunity to educate people about something that you taught me when we had dinner last, which is that if you’re going to order a steak, order a Pittsburgh char. The char on the outside is incredibly tasty. They’re-Right. Right. We love that umami taste. Is there? I wish you had devoted taste receptors there. Yeah, yeah. It’s complex. Yeah. So, if they don’t know what a Pittsburgh char is, then you’re in the wrong restaurant, or you need to educate them. Right.
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But incredibly satiating, delicious, right? But if you were to slather those steaks in a bunch of things, I would suspect that after a while, your plain steaks wouldn’t taste as good. Oh, certainly. But the way to make them taste good again would be to eat them plain for a period in which the stuff, all the condiments, et cetera, would start to become aversive. I do believe that when we return to the most naturally satisfying mode of engaging with these circuits. Here we go. Here, we’re talking about food and sex in parallel, that they become especially satiating. And I think that you know, in hearing from all these people that are addicted to pornography, and they’re not addicted like it’s telling me they love it, and they can’t stop.
They’re telling me it’s no longer working for them, that there’s this, you know, diminishment in the amount of dopamine that they’re getting over time. They feel trapped within it, and they have no sense whatsoever because they haven’t been socialized to go out and find a real relationship, a real sexual relationship or a relationship of any kind. Well, also, it’s, there is some evidence. Yeah. There’s evidence suggesting, too, that if you’ve been socialized into pornography and sexuality, it’s actually quite difficult to establish a sexual relationship with an actual partner. Now, I would say, to some degree, that’s always been difficult because it’s a complex form of behavior. But the introduction of pornography, well, it sets up a whole landscape of expectation, for example, that’s not necessarily going to play out that well in the real world, let’s say.
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So, yeah. And, and there’s also a learning of those biological systems in the brain. I mean, the brain has to be very strong enough to evoke a real by observing sex as opposed to participating in it. Right, right, right. Completely different. Right, right. So, some of these, uh, that’s a voyeur. Right, you’re basically learning to be a voyeur. Uh-huh. Right, right. Right. And so, you think about young brains that are highly plastic, learning that. So, the returning-Yeah, we have no idea what to make of that, because, especially for young men, because when they hit puberty, sexuality becomes a very, uh, insistent force. And we have no idea what effect uh-pornography has on the development of male sexuality.
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