porn will rewire your brain

“Help! I’ve Been Told Porn Will Rewire Your Brain!”

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(Last Updated On: June 29, 2019)

In popular culture, there’s a lot of concern that porn will rewire your brain. It’s claimed that pornography use changes the way that we think and has the power to change your sexual interests. More insidiously, it’s claimed that it can change the structure of our brains in a particularly damaging way. The truth is, while some of this is right, an awful lot of it is wrong.

If you’ve come here looking to find ways to stop or cut down using pornography, this might seem a strange tack. However, if your goal is to make changes, then arm yourself with the truth.

porn will rewire your brain

Image credit © Andrey Burmakin - Bigstockphoto.com

Our changing brains

Let’s go back a bit. Until recently, we believed that our brains were fixed structures. Then, through the work of Norman Doidge and his book The Brain that Changes Itself, it became part of the public discussion that brains can actually change, and continue to do so over the course of our life. Our brains change their structure all the time – that’s just normal.

 

Pornography – a special case?

However, when it comes pornography, we seem to think that pornography has a special way of changing the brain. It’s almost as if we’re back to thinking again that the brain shouldn’t change; and when it does, something is wrong. Yes, porn will rewire your brain – but so does everything else. Dr. Nicole Prause, neuroscientist and clinical psychologist, who has been researching brains in sex is adamant; the way that pornography changes the brain is the same way that everything else changes the brain.

 

Did porn make me like this?

Further, she states something which is really quite obvious; pornography doesn’t have the power to change our sexual interests. Let’s say someone wasn’t interested in a particular sort of sexual act. Making them watch repeated videos of the sexual act isn’t going to make them like it more. It just makes them bored and irritated and ask you to turn the video off! Our defence of ‘porn made me like this’ just doesn’t stack up. It’s understandable though; it’s much more tolerable to believe that ‘pornography did this to me’. The alternative – that this is part of who you are – is harder to swallow.

 

Dopamine – it’s not what you think

Lastly, Dr. Prause also comments on how pseudoscience makes much of the fact that dopamine is involved when people watch pornography. However, this is a misunderstanding of the role of dopamine in the brain. Dr. Prause clarifies; dopamine functions in the brain as a way of helping us remember what we like and it’s present whenever we get exposed to things that we like. Our brains are no more susceptible to pornography than to anything else.

In summary: if you want to change your pornography use, then don’t be scared that porn will rewire your brain. Be informed.

I offer individual counselling and couples counselling regarding pornography use in Richmond in Sunbury. If you’d like to know more about Nicole Prause, you can read an interview with her.

Let me know what you think in the comments. Now, read about What is Pornography? Why We Cannot Agree.

-Tim Hill

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Tim Hill

I do this work because I believe that with the right help and support, people change – I see it all the time. Whether you are battling something big or small, I believe that change is possible even when you don’t know how to change, when things seem hopeless or when the odds are stacked against you