Video Transcript: What Happens to the Brain on Porn? - The Coolidge Effect

Here's another reason Internet porn is so stimulating and so addictive. It takes advantage of  an old program located in your primitive brain. The subconscious program is what got you  started down the path of using porn. Consider this experiment, it's been done many times, I  guess scientists have nothing better to do. What happens when you drop a male rat into a  cage with a receptive female? Well, first, you see a frenzy of copulation. Progressively the  male tires of female number one, she wants more, but he's had enough, he just can't get  excited anymore. So what do you do? Well replace the original female with a fresh one. And  the male revives and gallantly struggles to fertilize her he keeps on going. Then the same  things happen, the male loses interest in female number two, starting to see a pattern here.  This process can be repeated again and again. But with novel partners. Now, I'm not sure  how many times this can be repeated. But this can be repeated until the male nearly dies of  exhaustion. See, this is a genetic program. This has nothing to do with your genitals. It's all  happening in the brain. And the purpose of it is to make more babies. But even more  importantly, it's to increase the genetic variety of the male's offspring. Here's an interesting  graph, which happens to be about rams. As we can see, we have female presentation at the  bottom, we have time to ejaculation in minutes on the left side, and we have a male. In one  experiment, the male had the same female over and over again. And in another experiment,  he had different females. How long did it take him to ejaculate? Well, if you look at the same  female, he got longer and longer until finally, I guess, when they stopped the experiment, it  took 18 minutes. Now, a ram only lives 12 years. So 18 minutes is like two hours in our time.  So it's quite a bit of time. And of course, with different females here ejaculated quite quickly,  which of course, means he was very, very excited. If you think about heavy porn users, they  often need more novelty just like this animals to get excited. Here's what's going on with the  animals. It's called the Coolidge effect. It starts out with declining interest in the present  sexual partner, then renewed vigor in a novel sexual partner. This is present in all mammals.  And it's also present in females. And of course, we said, it's here for genetic variety of the  offspring. This is what you started down the road to getting hooked on porn. You see, with  porn, you're like a lab rat. Your primitive brain urges you to fertilize the two dimensional  females or whatever is on your screen. So you're happily married and partnered up? You'd  say, No, I'm never going to cheat. Well, either way, the Coolidge Effect is still at work in your  brain. The more rational parts of your brain are saying, No, I'm not going to cheat. But the  primitive parts of your brain are saying, well, look at that, or maybe fantasizing what would be  like to have sex or maybe you're using porn. This is a subtle reminder of the deep  programming of your brain, the Coolidge effect that's there to spread your genes far and wide. Speaking of looking, maybe we're not so unique. Here's an interesting research. The headline is monkeys payed to see female monkey bottoms. What are they paying with? Well, monkeys loves sweets, like fruit juice. So in a study, the male monkeys would give up their fruit juice in  order to look at female bottoms. You know, this is a little bit like porn, or maybe a lot like porn,  monkey porn. Here's the limbic system. The primitive brain where the old program is installed  is often called the limbic system, or mammal brain. It's the part of the brain we have in  common with all mammals, including that monkey we just saw. It's true. We have only a single brain, but certain parts have specific jobs. This part is ancient, 100 million years old or older,  and its job is all about survival. Now, I could spend an hour talking about all its functions, but  what's important to us is that it governs emotions, such as fear, joy, anger, etc. And  importantly, it is also the seat of most of our desires and our drives, including the hunger,  mate selection and our sexual urges. You see, sexual desire or libido is not in your genitals.  It's here. This is where you experience the Coolidge effect and where all addictions happen,  including porn addiction.