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Sept. 1, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:02:14
3811 Your Brain On Porn | Gary Wilson and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
We're talking today with Gary Wilson.
He's the author of Your Brain on Porn.
So please close your other browsers and try and concentrate on what we're saying.
Your Brain on Porn colon, Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction.
His website is yourbrainonporn.com.
And you can follow his Twitter handle at twitter.com forward slash yourbrainonporn.
All one word. Gary, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Hey, it's great to be here. So in this unacknowledged, massive social experimentation of giving young men and young women, and of course it's not just young men and young women who consume pornography, but There's kind of a generational divide that you talk about in your book.
There's this huge social experiment on let's see what happens if we basically allow for the rewiring of sexual stimulus, dopamine responses, and so on in an entire generation of significantly undersupervised young people with their access to the internet.
I wonder if you could help people to understand some of the biological basis behind why This sort of high-stimulus, endless, creative, and hyper-stimulating internet pornography can be challenging to maintain a healthy focus on adult sexuality.
Well, if you think about it, before 2006, things were quite different.
I mean, we think about the internet as the start of internet porn, but it was really 2006 with the invention of what were called tube sites or gallery sites where it allowed anyone to watch streaming videos, hardcore videos, any type of videos of anything, and just put up one tab after another and click from video to video.
Before that, you didn't have the free streaming.
And before high speed or broadband, you didn't really have the ability to even watch a video very easily.
You had to go on CASA. So this is the first time really when young men, young women were able to just watch anyone do anything.
And they could condition themselves in two ways, the way I view it.
You can condition yourself, oh, this is the way people have sex, this is the way I should have sex, I should do these acts.
Secondly, there's a different type of conditioning that occurs where, oh, this is what I need to turn me on.
And for a A porn viewer who's chronically using, that would be needing to be a voyeur, needing to click from scene to scene, needing constant novelty, needing all these things in order to be aroused.
And what would often occur is when young men and Occasionally young women would get together with a real partner.
Watching internet porn is not the same as engaging in sex, so they couldn't get aroused.
So there's all sorts of implications, but that's the first implication that I talk about.
Well, and I think the way that you talk about particularly this dopamine issue, the sort of I want it chemical, it's important to think of the brain, it will constantly try to dampen down excessive stimulation.
You know, like if you suddenly hear a loud noise, you're going to do this.
You're going to try and dampen down the loud noise input.
If you suddenly have a bright light switched on, you know, you're going to squint, your pupils are going to do their thing.
And so the idea that our brain is kind of wired for a particular level of stimulation and ladling more and more stimulation, uh, You have to kind of get weirdly analogous.
You wear it out.
It's short circuits or whatever it is.
But I think this seems to be one of the reasons why the addict is chasing a satisfaction that requires often ever-escalating doses of stimulation and never achieves the satisfaction that the addiction kind of promises.
Well, you don't even need addiction for that to occur.
So what you're talking about is the reward system, and the reward system is powered largely by dopamine.
And dopamine isn't really a pleasure chemical, it's a wanting chemical.
So when you're surfing and you're about to click onto a new video, You get a little squirt of dopamine in anticipation.
Dopamine is also released for novelty.
And interesting enough, dopamine is also released for anything that shocks or surprises you.
And even dopamine is released for anxiety.
And so many videos, gang rape, bestiality, even strange stuff, can cause anxiety in the porn user.
So what's interesting about internet porn, it's sort of a supernormal stimulus in that it has many ways that it can increase dopamine.
And what does dopamine do?
Dopamine tells you this is very, very important and you need to repeat it again because it's important for your survival.
Dopamine is released for sex, for eating, for falling in love, for anything that's important, whether it's achievement, etc.
What occurs in addiction if you look at something like cocaine?
Cocaine Increases dopamine.
In fact, any drug that can cause addiction, it has to do one thing.
Increase dopamine in the reward system.
If it doesn't do that, it can't cause addiction.
So what you were talking about is the Increasing dopamine, increasing dopamine, increasing dopamine, what the reward system does, as you described, is it sort of shuts down, and it becomes less sensitive to dopamine, and it may even produce less dopamine.
For example, an alcoholic, once an alcoholic becomes an alcoholic, they can drink alcohol, but they have less dopamine response.
A cocaine addict will have less dopamine response than taking cocaine, so their brain is shutting down, so the same thing can occur Well, and of course...
You can't necessarily, as easily as you point out, be aroused by the pornography you looked at a month ago or a week ago, perhaps.
But also, of course, this level of variety and hyperstimulation is impossible to achieve with any kind of real partner.
And I think that remains...
A challenge. At one point, you point out in the book that, you know, over a couple of hours, you can see more partners and more sexual novelty than like half a tribe could have 100,000 years ago.
And that is not something that our brains are really used to handling or processing.
Yes. And so another way to look at it is we can control our arousal.
We can control our dopamine levels with a mouse, with a swipe.
And so that's something you can't do when you're really having sex.
You can't sit there and go, well, it's been two minutes.
I'm bored with her. I'm going to swipe.
It just doesn't work.
You can't watch your partner.
You can't Well, I guess you could, but that's the only way you can become aroused.
And we have guys report that they could only become aroused by looking at a woman on a screen.
If it's a real woman, they can't get aroused, so they've actually trained their brain in order to see it through a screen.
So dopamine, as I said, you can wear out the system, but what dopamine does, it also causes brain changes, rewiring, so that you become aroused with everything associated with your addiction.
For example, a cocaine addict.
If he goes back to the He gets a big spike of dopamine and he experiences cravings.
In fact, that spike of dopamine might be higher than the dopamine released when he's using.
So everything in your environment when you're an addict and you're using sort of triggers the dopamine response and causes these very hard to ignore cravings.
Well, a porn addict, they are wiring in everything associated with their porn use and so that's what makes them aroused and that doesn't match real sex.
Right. And I think at one point in the book you point out that these triggers can be non-sexual, everything that's associated with the masturbatory act.
So there was one, I think it was a young man who, when his parents left to go out and the door slammed when he was trying to quit porn, he ended up feeling the urge because that would be his association that the house was free.
Yeah, there's not only those external associations like the house being free.
It could be turning on the computer.
It could be a pop-up on a new site of some naked lady on the Daily Mail.
You know, that's what they have on the site.
But also, it can be sort of internal triggers of boredom, anxiety, stress.
In fact, many... Many addiction experts are suggesting that addiction is largely a stress disorder.
It changes the stress system so that even a little bit of stress actually activates the reward system and causes cravings.
The other half of the stress problem is when you stop using for a few days, no matter what the addiction is, The stress system becomes overactive and you feel anxiety, irritability, maybe insomnia.
So you start experiencing the normal withdrawal symptoms that are common to all addictions.
That's part of the stress system.
So lots of changes occur in the brain that make it very hard to quit if you actually become addicted.
Right. And it's funny, you know, because there's an old trope among people who study these kinds of things or a sort of cliche.
I think it's pretty true, which is that anytime a new technology is invented, it is almost immediately spread through pornography.
The film industry originally showing films at home had a lot to do with pornography, the old VHS prevalence and so on.
I sort of think men invented fire so that women would come closer at nighttime.
I mean, This is the entire point of technology.
It seems to be driven by both male and, I guess, increasingly female now, desire to look at pornography.
I wonder if you could give people a brief history of just how far back in time.
You know, when did we first, hey, we've got a piece of wood.
We could make it into a spear or we could carve it into a set of boobs.
And I think people just went straight for the set of boobs and later on they figured out the spear thing.
Well, yeah, so this really what this brings up to me, we understand there's pornography has been around forever.
But if you if you drop back to When I was younger, you had Playboy.
And you had a centerfold.
So think of a 13-year-old boy bumping into a centerfold, and all he saw was a naked woman.
So what could he imagine?
Well, he could imagine maybe feeling up her boobs, maybe touching her.
Now, if you jump to 2017, you have unbelievable hardcore porn.
So his imagination is now replaced by...
engaging in so-called actual sex so his he no longer has an imagination he is watching people have sex so so even though people say well porn's been around for a long time no streaming porn video porn actually affects the brain differently from static images That's been proved in experiments.
It's far more arousing, and it activates different parts of the brain.
Then you get to free streaming porn in 2006, and that changes everything.
Think back to the 80s.
A parent would have been arrested if they'd shown their child, you know, basically what is softcore porn now.
But now the child can go into his room at age 11 and watch the hardest of the hard and there's no repercussions.
That's because things have changed so drastically in that time.
So I really want to point out that things, that internet porn is not like your dad's porn or my porn back in the day.
sort of to me the analogy is, well, fat and sugar have been around forever as well, but the way in which they're concentrated and marketed and included and infused in just about every kind of food stuff that you could imagine, including food stuff, I have no idea why it's there, then it's really changed the way that people deal with nutrition, something that has been then it's really changed the way that people deal with nutrition, something that has been around forever but was relatively hard to go and battle bees to get some
And now it's everywhere, infused in everything, and that has fundamentally changed our body's relationship to nutrition in the same way that the sort of access to hardcore pornography at the click of a button has changed our brain's relationship to sexual stimulus.
Yeah, think about it. I don't think I've ever seen an obese hunter-gatherer.
When you see pictures from Africa or pictures from Brazil, none of them are obese.
And yet Americans, 35% of adults are obese and 70-some percent are overweight, yet none of them want to be.
So it's the environment that's changed.
Concentrated fats and concentrated sugars combined with concentrated salt didn't exist in nature.
And all of those activate the reward system.
In fact, you can take rats and give them free reign to basically what they call cafeteria food, something you'd find, you know, at some restaurant, bacon and fat and ice cream, and almost 100% of them We'll eat to obesity, and within about seven to ten days, their dopamine responses will decline in the brain, so they'll start to change even before they have a full-blown addiction.
So yes, it's a powerful stimulus, modern junk food, and then sex takes it to the next level, because of course, what's the number one purpose of every organism?
To reproduce. And then what is the biggest reward in terms of our brain, in terms of dopamine, in terms of endorphins and opioids?
It's sex and orgasm.
So now we've co-opted the sexual circuits, the innate sexual circuits, just like the innate eating food circuits of the brain have been hijacked by modern junk food.
Right. And it sort of struck me, the sort of back of the day, of course, The Great Reward, and your book does focus a lot on men and sort of get to the female consumption in a bit.
But one of the things that struck me was that sort of back of the day, I mean, way back in the day, sort of Stone Age days, if you wanted, as a young hunter, a male, if you wanted sexual access, Then you had to go and kind of prove your worth.
You had to go out there, you had to say, okay, I'm able to provide for a family, and I'm respected within my tribe, and I'm willing to conform to basic tribal norms since I'm not some sort of freak who's going to be ostracized and thus put my offspring at risk.
And so the sexual access was something that came about after a significant amount of social self-proving.
And now with this massive variety, and as you point out in the book, variety is associated with overconsumption.
You eat more at a buffet than you do with a single serve a la carte.
And now of course, the orgasm is accessible with no social interaction.
And as you point out in the book, can sometimes eclipse people's desire or need for social interaction.
Well, especially now that we're going to have virtual reality porn, young men can interact with virtual reality.
And now we have sex dolls and sex robots, so soon you won't even need anyone at all.
Yeah, and guys mentioned this.
A lot of them have been interacting with a screen, not only porn, but playing video games for eight hours a day after they get home from school.
So they don't have the social skills.
And one of the interesting things which sort of dovetails with this is that one of the most common benefits that, again, primarily young men describe when they give up porn is not only does their confidence increase and their motivation to do things increase, but primarily young men describe when they give up porn is not only does their Some people were diagnosed with social anxiety, put on drugs, and they found out it was chronic use of porn.
That's still hard to explain, but that is reported over and over, even in those young men who do not feel they're addicted.
So the Internet now with Facebook, with video games, with porn is, I think, really inhibiting social development.
And, of course, we see increasing prescription of Viagra to the under-30 set, and erectile dysfunction seems to be growing.
This is a quote from your book.
You say, in 2014, a Canadian sexologist study showed that problems in sexual functioning are curiously higher in adolescent males than in adult males, which are already rising.
Said researchers, 53.5% of male teens were classified as reporting symptoms indicative of a sexual dysfunction.
Erectile dysfunction and low desire were the most common.
Now, of course, the stereotype of the perpetually horny teenage boy with the non-stop diamond heart erection seems to be kind of falling by the wayside if sexual dysfunction is rising among the young much faster than among middle-aged men.
Yeah, I mean, we go back to Kinsey's day in 1948, and men under 20, the ED rate was less than 1%.
Men under 45, it was about 3%.
And so we've seen some studies up to 33% in men under 40.
That's a 1,000% rise.
In Japan, they did a survey in 2010, 36% of Japanese men ages 16 to 19 had no interest in sex, and that had doubled since 2008.
So we're seeing some surveys that are showing ED rates in young men higher than older men.
That is nearly unbelievable.
And also the low libido rates.
The study you mentioned, the low libido rates were about 24%.
So one quarter of...
Young men, 16 to 21-year-olds, had low libido.
I can't even fathom that.
So something has drastically changed.
And if you look at something else, there was a study in 2015, and it found that the percentage of sexually active high school students People, high school, I think it was ages maybe 16 through 18, had dropped from 38% in 1991 to 30% in 2015.
So between 1991 and 2015, we haven't become more prudish, but yet the percentage of sexually active young people has significantly dropped.
So what's changed in that time?
Again, internet porn has changed.
That's the one variable in the environment that has really changed.
So let's talk about super normal stimuli.
I've always loved the story of the eggs and the birds.
I wonder if you can help people to understand how susceptible we are to, you know, you run too much current through electrical cables, they'll short out and they'll stop.
But that's not exactly how.
We adapt to it and then can't go back to regular stimuli.
Yeah, so supernormal stimulus or stimuli, it was coined by a Nobel Prize winner, Tim Bergen, I think back in the 30s.
And what he found is that you could, like you said, the birds.
So what he did is he created fake eggs.
And the fake eggs for shorebirds were larger, they were brighter, they had more speckles.
So the shorebirds actually...
Ignored their own eggs to sit on those other eggs and he then coined the term supernormal stimulus which was certain traits for certain animals will be more than what they experienced in nature and in doing so it will attract them more and so of course now modern junk food is quite different from chewing on venison or eating boiled roots And video games could be a supernormal stimulus because it's constant novelty,
it's constant achievement, you're getting all these squirts of dopamine.
And so in essence, Internet porn is a supernormal stimulus because, as you mentioned, because of the constant novelty, sexual novelty.
Sex is our greatest natural reward.
A novelty always gives us squirts of dopamine.
You combine them together and you have a supernormal stimulus where you can control the sexual novelty that you are exposed to.
And then, as I said before, you have searching and seeking creates dopamine, so that is added to what occurs with the internet.
Also, shock and surprise.
You know, if you go on a roller coaster, why do we like roller coasters?
Because it's sort of surprising, shocking, but it increases dopamine, and anxiety increases sexual arousal, And so much of porn can cause lots of anxiety in people.
They stop, they ejaculate, and they'll go, oh my god, what did I just masturbate to?
So we really have something unique in human history.
The internet's unique.
I mean, it's just...
And it's the delivery of constantly getting your little dopamine hit with each click.
It's just so unique in human history.
Well, you know, everything has its pluses and its minuses.
You know, the internet allows us to have this conversation, but I doubt these little video windows are going to show up on these tube sites for anyone.
So, pluses and minuses.
It's also something that has been noticed outside of human beings.
So I was really struck by one of the things you talked about in your book.
It said, interestingly, although it's unlikely a monkey would choose images over real mates, monkeys will pay or forego juice rewards in order to view images of female monkey bottoms.
I find that absolutely fascinating.
Well, two things we know that monkeys do.
They will pay for sex.
And here, apparently, they will also pay for pornography.
Yeah. Yeah, they will.
So that was quite a finding that they will look at female monkey bottoms and they'll forego juice rewards.
And monkeys love juice.
So it just shows that, you know, there you go.
Monkeys like porn. Yeah.
Now, let's talk about when the young men in particular start viewing the pornography.
I assume it's for a lot of young men, it's around puberty.
And we've got the challenge that you're getting the most stimuli at a time when your brain is the most susceptible to rewiring, at a time when your brain is at its peak of plasticity.
I wonder if you can help people understand what a challenge that can be.
Yeah, so when you talk about plasticity, what it means is that the brain is constantly reforming itself.
So it's making new connections and getting rid of old connections.
But what occurs about age 11 is the brain is at its largest.
And at that point, Through adolescence up to about age 24, 25, the brain is actually pruning connections so that it will be more efficient in its actions.
But what this does is you prune in relationship to your environment.
So if you're learning a new language, you do really great at age 10, 11, 12, and 13, but you don't do so good at age 50 because you have all these possibilities of connections, and the connections determine our thoughts, our memories, everything we learn.
Just to sort of reinforce that, I'm learning piano with my daughter, and it's embarrassing.
I mean, she's just flying through it, and I feel like I'm playing with my forehead.
But anyway, go on. Yeah, so that's the point.
So, adolescence. So, in all animals, mammals, excuse me, adolescence occurs.
And, of course, what's its purpose?
Its purpose is to rewire itself, its connections, to the environment so that it can successfully reproduce.
And so then what is the environment?
Well, prior to internet, the environment was all the girls in your class or you saw anywhere.
But now the environment, sexually, A male is masturbating.
Instead of thinking about Sally in math class, he's not thinking about anything.
He's watching adults do hardcore acts, and that's his sexual arousal.
So he may do that for two, three, six, seven years every day, masturbating to porn, rewiring his sexual arousal template to porn before he ever gets with a real person.
And that becomes a very powerful set of pathways.
Now, how do we know it's more powerful than an adult?
So what occurred when we first started monitoring this about 10 years ago is old guys, old guys being 30 or older, showed up on my wife's forum and they quit porn because they thought it causes sexual problems.
They had chronic ED. Well, they recovered in about six to eight weeks.
Then, later on, the younger guys who grew up using internet porn started to quit because they had erectile dysfunction.
It took them first maybe four months, five months.
Now we're seeing it take a year, two years, three years.
Young men in their 20s needing two to three years in order to achieve an erection with a real woman.
Yet the older men still, it doesn't take very long because they didn't grow up using internet porn during adolescence.
Right. And I can certainly see how this kind of, in a sense, death spiral of erections can occur.
Because if you're hyper-stimulated with freaky new stuff all the time on your internet browser...
And then you'll get used to that high level of dopamine addiction.
Then you go out and try and, you know, have sex with a real woman or a real man.
Then what happens, of course, is there's a crash.
And then because you have difficulty performing or staying around to become stressful and worrying, it becomes easier to go back to the pornography, which again makes it tougher to sort of emerge from that amniotic sack of self-stimulation and get out into the real world and have a relationship.
It certainly does, and that's one of the reasons they often go back.
Back to the dopamine thing, you said a crash, and that's actually what occurs because dopamine is about expectations.
So if someone told you, man, that movie was great, and you go to it, and the movie was okay but not great, you're actually disappointed.
You feel disappointed because your dopamine dropped.
Dopamine drops when His expectations are not met.
So you have a young male who's been masturbating to porn for six years.
He gets with a female. He goes, boy, this is going to be great.
This is going to be just like porn.
And it's not. His dopamine drops.
Not only is he disappointed, but since dopamine is behind erections and sexual arousal, He doesn't feel any sexual arousal.
He doesn't have an erection.
So he's actually conditioned his reward system to expect certain things.
He's actually training for the wrong sport.
It's like he's playing golf in order to become a basketball player and it just doesn't work out.
Right. Now, the sexual reward mechanism seems to be at the core of a lot of these kinds of physical addictions.
You point out alcohol and cocaine deal with dopamine-raising substances.
And that seems to me somewhat very important.
Anything which is hardwired into our sexual reward centers has the potential, I think, to almost like demonic possession to sort of take us over because it's the fundamental reason why we're all here and why we all evolved.
Yes, so there's something, if we want to get more technical, the reward center is actually a place within the reward system and it's a place where we decide moment to moment whether we want to approach something or go away from it.
It's constantly deciding for us with all the other input from other parts of the brain.
Now, what's interesting is if you get down into the reward center and you look at it even closer on animal models, you find That the sexual part that gets turned on and causes our excitement is actually largely separate from other natural rewards.
It's separate from drinking water.
It's separate from food. And what they found is that meth Cocaine, heroin, those type of drugs actually turn on the sexual nerve cells in the reward center, but not so much the others.
So in other words, why these drugs are so addictive is because they actually hijack, literally hijack, the same nerve cells that are there for sexual arousal.
It also helps explain why those who are chronically on drugs Drugs like cocaine and meth, once they get off, they have no libido at all.
So, they're not getting that same group of nerve cells stimulated.
So, you know, you hear sexologists say, oh, well, everything's the same.
You know, watching sunsets, petting your cat, it's all the same as sex.
So, does that mean you can get addicted to watching sunsets?
It's not the same. It's not at all the same.
The nerve cells for sex are quite different, and they're the same ones activated by the hard, addicted drugs.
And as you point out in the book, and I really want to reinforce this point, and we'll put links to the book, of course, below, and I really recommend that people have a look at it.
But you point out that if you're addicted to food, you know, there's that Mr.
Creosote satiation point where you just can't eat any more food and you have to stop.
And, of course, a lot of people would imagine that internet pornography has, as its end point, the orgasm.
But, you know, it's never a bad day when you learn a new word.
But, as you point out, there's this phrase called edging, wherein you can continue, in a sense, like the old Roman style, like you'd eat a meal, you'd throw up in a bucket, and then you'd eat again.
You can keep this kind of cycle going with internet pornography, which is, in a sense, the worst thing you can do for this artificial dopamine race.
Yeah, so you have two things going on.
You talk about edging, and that's described quite a bit, where guys will decide not to orgasm in order to elongate their session.
And they may describe two, three, four hours.
And so they're clicking through maybe 100, 200 videos while they're edging and not orgasming.
And during all this time, the dopamine is very high.
And so dopamine is a brain training exercise.
It says, okay, this is very important.
So they're training for very long periods through edging.
And often edging is associated with eventually coming down with sexual dysfunctions, we have found out, having read thousands of these stories.
But here's the other thing about satiation.
So, yeah, you know, you're full with food.
But as you said, there's no limit really to Internet porn.
So guys will have an orgasm and then they'll go searching for something really novel or extreme to cause shock, surprise, anxiety.
And then that ups their dopamine and they become aroused.
And so they do it again.
So they'll go through this up and down pattern sometimes for hours on end.
Or they'll just stop and they'll just start watching porn.
They'll watch porn on the airplane.
They'll watch porn while they're driving.
You know, with our smartphones, they'll just watch it at school.
We have guys describe that they're just watching it during a lecture.
So you can watch it without masturbating.
And that's very common.
Right.
And it is an interesting thing.
And, you know, these kinds of conversations, I always feel like a bit like as a Victorian schoolmaster, you know, you think it's good for you, but it's really bad for you.
Finger wag, finger wag. But of course, the whole point is to try and have people have a healthy relationship with sexuality and with partners and so on.
Because there is, as you point out the book, there are 70, 70, 70, it probably has changed since you wrote the book, 70 brain studies on internet addicts, which is more than, of course, just pornography, although pornography seems to be, you say Dutch Reaches found that online erotic has the highest addiction potential of all online applications.
I'm sorry, guys, online gaming is second.
We'll talk about that another time perhaps.
But the same core brain changes occur With internet addicts, as occur with substance addicts.
Because you talk about the distinction between addiction and compulsion, that addiction requires an external stimulus.
But your brain doesn't care.
It doesn't know that it's porn. It's just responding to the dopamine.
And to me, whatever would trigger that dopamine, increase that dopamine hyperextension, would result in these kinds of brain changes, which to me seem perfectly classifiable as addiction.
Oh yeah, they perfectly are.
So, if you can go to the front of my page, you'll see the list of brain studies.
There's actually now 230 internet addiction brain studies.
Every single one of them align with the addiction model.
There are now 35 neurological studies on porn users.
Every single one of them show brain changes consistent with substance addiction.
So, yes, the science is there, but back to the original thing.
So, people say, well, you know, cocaine, meth, they're external.
Here's the basic understanding of biology, is when you take drugs or even when you take prescription drugs, all they can do is increase or decrease a normal physiological mechanism.
And all addictive drugs do one thing.
They increase dopamine in a place called the nucleus accumbens or reward center.
If a drug doesn't do that, it can't cause addiction.
So we have, you know, we have pot, and we have meth, and we have cocaine, and we have Valium, and we have alcohol, and all of them can do it.
And those are the few molecules in the world that can do it.
And so they, therefore, they can become addictive.
So all they're doing is just increasing your normal dopamine levels.
And in fact, how high is sexual arousal?
Well, it increases dopamine about 200%.
What about nicotine?
200%. What about morphine?
200%. So, you know, it's a pretty powerful stimulus, sexuality is, and certainly internet porn is.
Right. Now, let's talk about some of the challenges because I remember these conversations, Gary, I always end up with the rebuttals.
Well, you know, correlation doesn't equal causation.
And that's, of course, a fair point, which I think has been relatively well dealt with in the study.
So you could say, well, you know, the people who use the Internet in an addictive way, particularly pornography...
Well, they're stressed, they're depressed, they're anxious, they have social anxiety, they have lots of dysfunction and so on.
And people will say, well, no, it's not that that's being caused by the internet.
It's because they have these things in a pre-existing condition.
They end up being more drawn towards the internet.
The internet is another symptom.
It is not the cause.
I wonder if you could help people unpack some of the cause and effect that has been brought out.
I'm thinking in particular the Chinese studies.
Well, so cause and effect.
So without a doubt, people who become addicted, they are going to have a higher rate of what are called comorbidities, just like you strive.
Social anxiety, depression, OCD, ADHD, bipolar.
However, addiction still occurs.
So once you chronically use meth, you become addicted to meth, no matter what pre-existing condition you have.
Now let's go to internet porn addiction.
So we have 35 brain studies.
The brain changes that occur with addiction are very specific, so they're not random.
And so they know what to look for because we've had 60 years of looking at animal models and 30 years of looking at humans with the brain scans, and so we know what brain changes occur.
And those are the brain changes they're looking for, and that's what they found in internet porn addicts.
So it would be quite a coincidence if all these brain studies, all these people were born with all these brain changes.
In fact, it would be impossible.
So when we talk about correlation in terms of some of these effects, like what occurs is young men have unexplained sexual dysfunctions.
They then give up porn, and after 90 days, 6 months, their sexual dysfunctions heal.
That's causation.
Because there's no other cause for a 20-something to have ED with masturbation.
Now get this, they have ED with apartment, but they also have erectile dysfunction when they try to masturbate without porn.
So what could cause that?
The only thing that could cause it would be a severe organic problem.
Well, they don't have an organic problem.
So thousands of stories of young men healing medical conditions, sexual medical conditions, by giving up porn.
Then we have thousands more of young men and some young women who see their social anxiety decrease, their depression decrease, their Brain fog go away.
Their motivation go up.
Many, many benefits occur.
So that again is showing causation.
There are five studies.
Five studies that have had porn users stop using porn.
All five studies found significant changes.
Three of the studies were studies on men with sexual problems.
The sexual problems were healed.
One study was on couples, and when they gave up porn, tried to give up porn for three weeks, they valued their partners more than the ones who didn't give up porn.
Then they had another study, and this was looking at the ability to delay gratification.
You know the marshmallow experiment where you put the marshmallows in front of the kids, and those that are able to resist eating the one marshmallow will get a bunch more marshmallows.
That's the ability to delay gratification.
It's very important in success in life.
Well, what happened is in this study they had two groups.
One group gave up their favorite food.
The other group tried to give up porn for three weeks.
Those that gave up porn after a battery of tests were found to have much greater ability now to give up, you know, to delay gratification than they did before they gave up porn.
So porn was unique because those that gave up their favorite food Didn't see any changes.
So the studies that have actually looked and eliminated porn, they have found significant changes.
Well, I mean, self-control is a muscle.
It strengthens when you exercise it, and it weakens when you don't.
It's just one of these wisdoms that used to be accepted, which we kind of gave up in the bland biological rush to hedonism.
But the point was, in this experiment, it had two groups, and one group tried to give up their favorite food.
So they were trying to exercise that muscle, but it had no changes.
It was giving up porn that created the changes.
One of the things that I think is really fascinating in the book is that you talk a lot about the dysfunctions that occur in the sexual realm, but it seems to be such a holistic challenge when your brain adapts itself to this kind of dopamine stimulation, easily available, as you can say, available for hours at a time, is that there seems to be, and I don't know if there's studies on this or this more comes out of anecdotal research.
If you can clarify that, Gary, that'd be great, but The men who talk about this report that there's a vividness to their emotions, to their ambitions, to their experience.
It's like, you talked about the brain fog, but it's not specific to sexual matters, to masturbation matters.
It is general to life ambition, to the vividness of your experience, to the food that you taste, to the ambitions that you have, to the highs and lows, the joys and sorrows that you experience, that it's like a big mute button for a Yeah, one of the most common benefits they describe is they feel more emotions.
They will say, you know, I cried for the first time in 10 years.
You know, I haven't cried since I was 13 and started using porn.
Or I was watching a movie and I started laughing more.
Today I saw a post on the forum that said, you know, everyone's saying that music is better, sounds better, and it's true.
So that's very common.
Colors are more vivid.
Food tastes better.
They come out of what is generally not just a brain fog, but a fog of life.
And they'll talk about seeing a girl, looking at her face, she smiles, and they feel their heart flutter, and they go, what's that?
And they don't know because they started using porn at 11 and they never felt those emotions when looking at a girl at school.
And they're going, oh my god, what's this weird feeling I'm feeling?
Well, they're feeling excitement from just seeing a girl smile at them.
So that is one of the most common things.
And so if we think, what could possibly be the cause?
Well, neurologically, you know, dopamine is about Motivation.
It's there for learning.
In fact, ADH drugs are dopamine-raising drugs.
Social anxiety, low dopamine.
They often get dopamine drugs.
So dopamine is involved with everything that motivates you to go after anything in life.
So when it's low and diminished, it can have broad, far-ranging effects on many aspects of your existence.
Well, and I think it's interesting because I get a lot of comments.
I'm going to be 51.
I get a lot of comments from people like, I can't believe how much energy you have, how much work you do, how much you produce, and so on.
And these are people who are like 30 years younger than me.
I was like, man, when I was 20, I was like, I wanted to eat the world and shit out of Blindingly Bright Future.
I mean, you know, the idea that there is this torpor or this, I mean, I know that there has been significant declines in testosterone among Western males.
I don't know if there's any relationship between this and Internet because it started occurring, I think, after the Second World War.
But I think it's hard.
And there's an old Seinfeld about this.
Like if they give up masturbation, he's like, I can think, I can do things, I have clarity and so on.
And I think it's hard for people to understand who they are if they do have this dysregulation in the dopamine system, which sounds like a very abstract way of saying you've kind of become a robot to a lack of stimulation.
Well, it's not only a dysfunction in the dopamine system, it's a dysfunction in the stress system.
So you can't handle very much stress.
So you can imagine that would also have an effect too.
Oh, this is too much.
I can't handle it. And then it also, if the addiction really becomes bad, it affects what's called the prefrontal cortex.
And so they have found that in 11 studies in porn users or porn addicts that their prefrontal cortex is affected.
And the prefrontal cortex is behind most of our Human cognitive great things, so the ability to process information, the ability to do pretty much everything that's human.
It's associated with the prefrontal cortex and it's functioning.
So that can be dampened down.
So when you eliminate porn and you probably get the heck off the internet, I mean, think about it.
So we talk about dopamine.
Well, dopamine is telling you you've accomplished something.
So if I click on a new site, I get a little squirt of dopamine.
Did I accomplish anything? No.
If I all of a sudden shoot someone because I'm playing a video game, it's like, wow, look at that.
I scored that. It's dopamine jumps up and it says I accomplished anything, but I didn't accomplish anything.
If I just click on a video of a woman and she's moaning and groaning, my brain may think that I'm having great sex with the women and impregnating her when I ejaculate, but I'm not.
So you're looking at a screen, you're getting all these shots of dopamine, it's telling your brain you're accomplishing great things and you're not accomplishing anything.
Yeah, you don't end up with a family just with a sticky mess, which is not going to do much good for you as you age.
You do talk a lot. I want to point this out because this is kind of a particular beef that I have, Gary, so I hope I won't go too much on a rant here.
But a particular beef that I have is that male health issues seem to take kind of a backseat as a whole in society.
Look at sort of the funding versus prostate cancer versus breast cancer and so on.
But in this particular situation, I think we're good to go.
At the very least say, well, there seems to be some anecdotal evidence that porn usage, porn overconsumption can lead to these kinds of issues.
But the people you talk about who try and figure out what's going on with their plumbing generally don't hear any of this.
And it seems like, I don't know, like smoking in 1930 or something.
It's just like way behind the times as far as even some of the anecdotal information that could be passed along by health professionals.
Yeah, you kind of...
That's a great description.
So guys will often describe, I go to the urologist and I say, you know, I got ED. And he says, well, it's performance anxiety because you're in your 20s.
And then the guy will ask, you know, what about masturbation?
And the doctor will say, no, masturbation doesn't cause ED. And that's the end of the conversation.
So what's missing in that conversation?
The young man, when he says masturbation, he means masturbation to porn.
And that's why the new word FAP was invented, right?
Because there is masturbation and there's masturbation to pornography.
And I didn't even know that distinction.
Thanks again for the book, new word.
But FAP means masturbation to like usually intense internet porn, not like just like a picture of someone in a swimsuit, but that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah.
So there's always this disconnect.
Now, last year I published a peer-reviewed paper, a review on internet porn and sexual dysfunctions with seven US Navy doctors.
So they were becoming aware of it.
I gave a talk last month to a very large chain of urology clinics, medical doctors, about this.
So they're becoming aware.
And the reason they asked me to give this talk is because they've seen a tremendous drop in the average age of those clients that are coming to see them for sexual dysfunctions.
And if you go to my front page, I have a few things that are sticky there.
One of them is the studies that link porn use or porn addiction to sexual problems.
There's about 20 of them now.
And now there's about 120 articles by urologists, urology professors that also are suggesting that porn can cause problems.
However, As you said, it's moving really slow, so the vast majority of men who go to doctors, urologists, or GPs, the GPs will never even think of porn as the problem.
And you're right, a lot of men's health problems are...
Yeah, not addressed correctly.
And what my site did differently is it didn't look at, okay, porn is bad.
We came from the view that what effect is internet porn having primarily on men?
And we suggest young men, all men, give it a break and see if they feel better.
So we sort of clashed at the beginning with Some other groups who were either religious-based or feminist-based who said, you know, we need to look at this from porn's bad because it's about patriarchy or it's about that.
And maybe it is, but my concern was the users.
What effect is it having on the users?
So now that's becoming more widespread, and I'm happy about that.
Okay. I think it was in the book, Gary, you talk about, I think it was on your wife's message board that only about 7% of the men who came along came along to talk about these issues out of concerns for religious, like violating religious morals or religious standards.
And the vast majority of them were like, you know, I haven't seen a non-porn boner in years, getting a little bit concerned, you know, I think for reasons that scientifically hold up.
But I do want to talk about...
Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, the 7% was on NoFap when they did a survey.
Only 7% were quitting for religious reasons.
And when they did a survey, 60% of members of Reddit NoFap, which is a huge site, about 230,000 members trying to give up porn, 60% were atheists or agnostics.
So this whole movement of, I guess if you can call it, to give up porn is largely based, is non-religious based.
Right. Now, where I think some of this dysfunction doesn't show up as much visibly for a variety of reasons is female porn addiction.
So recent studies, like one in three of the adults who are browsing internet porn sites are women, and some of their tastes seem to gravitate a little bit towards the darker stuff at times.
But of course, with women, the erectile problem doesn't show up as much.
If you have enough lubrication or whatever, then they're not going to Where do you think it stands for women or have studies been shown that there are similar effects on women?
Do they differ from what happened to men's brains?
So they really haven't looked at women either in the brain studies or in the sexual dysfunction studies.
There was one couple of studies that did come out That actually found that porn use was related to less sexual satisfaction, but sometimes with women it was more sexual satisfaction.
So it's really very poor on the women's side.
And as you said, the key factor is that men can recognize pretty clearly With their erection, okay, is it working or not?
Where a female will often blame the partner.
Now, the women, not long ago, a few years ago actually, my wife did do a search for females who had problems on red and nofap.
And surprisingly, there was quite a few.
What they would also do, many of the women, is they would combine a vibrator, another supernormal stimulus that can't be matched in nature, with porn.
And they would complain, I can't orgasm with a partner, or I'm having even trouble orgasming with porn.
So a few women would recognize it, but I really think that it's much, much harder for females to recognize the problem.
And this is always the question.
How are women affected?
How many women are affected?
And really, there's not a lot of good information out there.
Well, it's funny, and this is, of course, amateur theorizing time, so I just invite listeners to toss this aside if it makes no sense.
But my sense of things, Gary, is that the woman's sexual stimulus, a man's sexual stimulus is generally related to signs of fertility, like youth and curvaceousness and so on, good hair and whatever, right?
Whereas a woman's sexual stimulus tends to be, I mean, of course, you know, reproductive fitness and fertility, but it has a lot more to do with other complicated things regarding men.
So, for instance, where the man stands on the social hierarchy can be important, how many resources the man can bring to the relationship.
And I'm thinking the Fifty Shades of Grey example where that to me seems a real example of hyper-stimulation for women.
Because, you know, usually if you want a rich man, well, he's been sitting at a desk for quite a long time and he's not going to have washboard abs.
And if you have a guy who's got that much time to work out, he's probably not going to have that much money.
But it all comes together.
He's gorgeous. He's really wealthy.
He's... Fantastic physique and so on.
And all of these things don't tend to tie together.
And so I think where women's sexual response gets hyper-stimulated, it's with a wide variety of things that have more to do with the fact that, evolutionarily speaking, women would be dependent on a man to bring them resources when they have kids.
So you wouldn't want to just go for fertility markers, but resource markers would be important as well.
Yeah, it's interesting that when it comes to porn, an interesting phenomenon is that women often gravitate towards gay porn.
So they're watching two men.
Another thing is they have in the past, I don't know how it is, gravitated towards the stories.
They like to have stories where the men don't.
So those are some differences.
And you're talking about, you know...
The female is gravitating towards a male, you know, an alpha male with resources.
That's sort of our evolutionary view.
Today, about an hour ago, I saw a study where they found the opposite.
They found that the women were gravitating more towards good-looking men, and so it's like it just completely turned things upside down.
So who knows if things are changing now that the internet is giving us all this stuff.
Women can get resources from the state through the welfare state, so that may have lowered their requirement for these kinds of resources.
So let's talk about some of the challenges that men face when deciding to weed themselves or quit cold turkey when it comes to internet pornography.
Is it flatlined?
That's the phrase that is used for non-responsive Yeah, so...
The interesting thing is that we're finding that even men that aren't addicted or aren't even using that much when they give up porn they also see benefits like there was a huge paleo group about three years ago and they challenged each other very famous guy I forget his name to give up porn for a month and so you had reports back like wow you know my wife I'm chasing her around you know my house I have a constant boner so So you don't need to be addicted to experience benefits.
But when you do give up, one of the things that does happen, usually about a week into giving up, often you feel great.
Oh, I have lots of energy.
Then you enter what they describe as the flatline.
What is the flatline? Well, your libido drops.
Sometimes they describe that their genitals shrink.
Some have described them turning blue, cold.
They look at women and they go, well, objectively, she's gorgeous, but I feel nothing.
And this flat line can last for a few weeks, but if you have a severe addiction, especially young men with a severe addiction, we've seen the flat line last for several months.
And what's odd is some of the young men who choose to then relapse back into porn, it kicks the flatline back in.
So it can be quite upsetting and they often return to porn and return to active lots of masturbation in order to get out of the flatline.
And there's a myth out there.
They'll say, well, this is just normal.
This is the way it's always been for males.
And I try to tell them, no, this is not how it's always been.
If you ever went to an army base back in the 50s and 60s, you had lots of prostitutes around it because when the men were in boot camp and they couldn't masturbate for eight weeks, they didn't lose their libido.
They didn't have shrunken penises and they didn't turn blue.
They're ready to go once they got a chance to get off base.
So, no, this is not normal for a man, and it doesn't naturally occur.
And there do seem to be, other than the physiological erectile dysfunction issues on quitting porn, there do seem to be a wide variety of fairly deep, almost existential anxieties, insomnias, depressions, again, the emergence of Maybe negative emotional experiences or very high positive emotional experiences, which, of course, if you're not used to, make you feel like you're going crazy if you've kind of been in this zombie fog for many years.
So it's not just what's going to happen with your sexual equipment.
It's what happened almost with your entire being that seems to be very profound.
Yeah, so there's two aspects that could occur.
First of all, just straight-up withdrawal symptoms.
And withdrawal symptoms absolutely occur when a porn addict stops using.
We've been collecting these for years, and they can be almost as severe as drug withdrawal symptoms.
Certainly, they have anxiety, depression, lethargy, etc.
But they also can have headaches, muscle aches.
Some guys have flu-like symptoms, so that could occur.
Now, the other part that could occur is your chronic porn use, your chronic internet use, could be masking depression, masking anxiety, masking OCD, so that when you give it up, these symptoms rise up and overwhelm you.
And one of the groups that we try to warn is those with obsessive compulsive disorder.
Those people who give up porn often have the hardest time, especially if they try to do Go without masturbation for 90 days.
We would never suggest it for them.
It just makes them literally just go nuts.
So you have to monitor yourself if you have pre-existing conditions, especially depression or OCD, and determine whether just giving up porn is okay or do like some of these websites suggest, okay, let's try 90 days without masturbation.
We're neutral on all that.
Everyone has to decide what's right for them.
You're right. And it does seem to be one of these alignment of the dark planet's tragedies that this growing access to hardcore pornography on the internet is coinciding with a lot of other social factors that are making men wary of dating and getting married.
You know, like... People who are concerned about how the family court system might treat them if they get divorced or rising rates of STDs or people who are concerned about false rape allegations or some of the stuff that's going on on campuses these days where, you know, men's lives can be ruined on a woman's say-so.
So it's at the same time that sexual activity is becoming, in the eyes of many, much more risky.
There is this, again, this cocoon of self-stimulation and, as you point out sometimes, self-medication.
That can occur. These two factors, I think, you know, not only is it comfortable inside, but it can be really cold and bitter outside as well.
Yeah, so a lot of the pushback I've gotten has been from, say, men's rights group or men's going their own way.
And I think they sort of mix up a few things.
So since they are deciding, a lot of them, to Not date or they've got divorce, they're not going to remarry.
They use porn and so they see porn as a right, which of course it is a right.
You can turn on the computer and do whatever you want.
But then they see perhaps me describing men benefiting from giving up porn and then they're saying, well, you're saying porn's bad and you're trying to take porn away from me.
And of course, none of that's occurring.
We're just giving information.
So I think they need to unpack a lot of these different things that they're dealing with and perhaps see clearly and maybe realize that even if they're choosing not to date or have a large break in dating or being in a relationship, that porn may not be the answer.
They might want to give porn a break also.
Well, if you want to fight an injustice in a system that you perceive, having more energy and clarity surely is not going to hurt you in that pursuit.
So I can see an argument to be made for that as well.
So I really, really appreciate your time.
I wonder if you can just end with a bit of the Shangri-La that men can expect who are facing this challenge and women perhaps as well who are watching or listening to this.
What's on the other side of the steep mountain of overcoming this kind of addiction?
What can men expect?
What are the positive reports that have been coming back?
So there's a meme that has been created in the last five to six years.
And it's that when I give up porn, I experience superpowers.
And it's mentioned every day on every forum.
Oh, what superpowers do you have?
What superpowers do you have?
Oh, girls are looking at me.
Oh, I got a boner just walking around.
Oh, I'm taking up golf.
Oh, I'm beating my dad in chess.
You know, And the superpowers are really returning to what is normal.
Instead of turning Japanese, I'm learning Japanese.
I think something like that. Yeah, so they're not flying, you know, they don't have x-ray vision, but they in fact are feeling like they have superpowers because they've been underwater so much.
And so you can expect to feel different if you've been a chronic porn user.
As we mentioned before, though, you may go through a period where you feel a lot worse before you come out the other side.
Right. Right. Well, again, I recommend the book is called Your Brain on Porn, Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction.
Don't wait until all the studies come out to examine this stuff for yourself.
You know, how many decades did it take before?
Centuries, really. People started smoking and eventually the science came out.
Don't wait. Necessarily look into this yourself.
The website is yourbrainonporn.com.
And, of course, you can follow Gary's Twitter at twitter.com forward slash porn.
Your brain on porn.
Thanks so much for your time today, Gary.
I think it was very illuminating.
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