Video Transcript: Introduction: What Happens to the Brain on Porn?

welcome to your Brain on Porn. This is a series for those who are hooked on porn, only you  can decide if you are. So my wife and I have a website on relationships. It has nothing to do  with porn, or at least it didn't. However, several articles were there on neuroscience of sex,  orgasm and love and evolution in sexuality and even addiction. So about five years ago, porn  users began showing up. I guess they found us through Google, and they began telling their  stories and blogging and cheering and more showed up and more showed up, we'd learned a lot. Here's a little bit of what we learned. Number one, Internet porn is not Playboy, but I bet  you already knew this. You know, the centerfold of the magazine gets old pretty quick. Internet porn is really far more stimulating than just images. It's really due to the endless novelty and  the ability to click from one image to another. Another reason that porn is so stimulating is that it can escalate rather quickly to more kinky or more shocking material. Number two, addictive  personality is not a prerequisite for getting hooked on Internet porn. Now, the standard model  is that you have to have a predisposition, you have to be genetically inclined to get addicted.  Well, this is definitely true. But what we found out is that many of the guys who were showing  up on this site had never had any other addiction. There were just regular guys who started  watching and got hooked. And what's interesting is once they got off a porn session, they  returned to their, quote, normal selves. Number three, understanding how heavy porn use  affects the brain is very helpful to users. When you understand how the brain works, it really  allows you to steer your ship a lot better when you're trying to get off porn. Here are the  basics. Porn overstimulated your brain and your brain changed. You see, being hooked on  porn is due to the same brain changes that occur with all addictions. these brain changes are  behind your cravings, these brain changes keep you coming back to porn, even if you want to quit. The Internet porn is what we call a super stimulus. What that means is that it's way  beyond what we've ever encountered during our evolution. Here's the big picture. We're a  hunter gatherer brain, living in a modern world, our environment has drastically changed. I  suppose I don't need to tell you that yet. Our brains have barely evolved in the last 100,000  years. This means we are not well suited to many aspects of modern life, from living in  isolated boxes, to going to work, to working in desk jobs to worrying about global warming or  the economy. We're supposed to be sitting around the campfire not sitting in front of a  computer watching Internet porn for hours a day. Here's another example of environment  changing and our brains not quite catching up. I haven't seen too many pictures of fat hunter  gatherers, have you? And yet 70% of Americans are overweight. So what's going on? Our  brains are programmed to love high calorie foods that's necessary for survival. In the old  days, it was very rare to find high calorie foods maybe honey sweet fruits nuts. Today, we  have refined carbohydrates and high fat junk foods. All of these are highly stimulating. So they cause supernormal stimulation way beyond anything we've ever encountered. Just like  internet porn. Brain, rule number one says, You must survive, which means get calories for  food. That means get it while the getting's good because you don't know when something's  going to rot, at least in the old days. So your primitive brain is urging you to binge at every  opportunity to get as much as you can. This leads to overconsumption This rule also applies  to sexual partners. Brain Rule number two, making babies. Well, maybe that's rule number  one. See, evolutions top priority is making more gene packets more copies of you. Here's a  question. In the lifetime of a hunter gatherer how many potential sexual partners would he or  she meet? Not too many, I imagine. How about how many would he have sex with? I'm sure a whole lot less. A heavy porn user would view more hot babes or hot guys or a hot whatever in  one session than our ancestors would need in several lifetimes. So this can be considered  another super stimulus. Our brains evolved to handle heavy porn use like this and don't like  junk food. You can never get full