Study Finds Porn Exposure Associated With Smaller Brain Region

New submitter Bodhammer (559311) writes "German researchers looked at the brains of 64 men between the ages of 21 and 45 and found that one brain region (the striatum, linked to reward processing), was smaller in the brains of porn watchers, and that a specific part of the same region is also less activated when exposed to more pornography." While it's tempting to cast blame, "the study doesn't confirm whether watching porn causes the changes, or whether people with a certain brain type are inherently more apt to tune into X-rated content." The study's abstract is available; the paper itself is pay-walled.

Do you give up higher cerebral function

[rmdingler]

in exchange for instant gratification of a primal nature?

Almost certainly.

Don't worry though, the reason you'll prosper if you live long is because aging gradually erodes the hold your base urges have upon you.

Does Size Matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as we have no evidence that such an area being smaller is a good or a bad thing I would caution away from using this information as anything more than an observation.

Correlation does not imply causation

[volkerdi]

More pseudoscience. They say that they're not sure whether this means that porn shrinks your brain, or if the shrunken brain causes porn viewing. But, this leaves out the very real possibility that this correlation means nothing whatsoever. The site below collects correlations that look pretty convincing in the graphs, but quite obviously are unlikely to be cases of causation in either direction:

http://www.tylervigen.com/ [tylervigen.com]

everyone's a brain scientist now

[globaljustin]

This is an interesting question to research but I wish TFA wasn't paywalled b/c there are several factors they'd need to address that aren't mentioned in the description.

1. is this just *watching* porn or watching and fapping...also fapping w/o any physical media stimuli

2. they'd need to compare a control test with a completely different behavior/stimuli that triggers those same parts of the brain...it's "reward center" so maybe something with video games or receiving compliments on your appearance

3. what about actual sex? does it do the same thing to this part of the brain? I know /.'ers probably can't imagine this but it's possible to have sex too much so I'd definitey need to see if actual sex is any different than their results with porn.

those are some good starters...plenty of room for further research which means job security ;)

Striatum

[Znork]

The striatum is implicated in ADHD and several studies have indicated reduced grey matter volume in that region for ADHD sufferers. Failure in the dopamine pathways will generally cause engagement in dopamine releasing activities, as a method of self medication.

So it's not like finding a correlation between dopamine seeking and striatum deficiencies is unexpected. And the most likely direction of causation is that the deficient reward region causes the increased porn watching.

Frankly I find the gleeful reporting on the issue to be somewhat offensive. Insinuating that what is probably an inherent handicap is something the handicapped did to themselves by being 'immoral' is quite disgusting.

Re:Do you give up higher cerebral function

[Samantha Wright]

Don't assume it means anything—the striatum's primary function is coordinating motor control. If there is a meaningful causal link and this study is not just a p-value fishing expedition, it is so convoluted as to be incomprehensible.

Re:Do you give up higher cerebral function

[Belial6]

It goes beyond that. Much of what we see day to day in technically non-porn magazines, billboards, TV commercials, signage in department stores, etc. would have been considered to be porn at various times in our history. Heck, when I was assigned to read, "The Scarlet Letter" in high school, it was immediately clear that it wasn't great writing. It was just 1800's porn.

Porn is not really an easily defined term. Any study that wants to be taken seriously needs to be very explicit as to what they are defining as "porn".

Re:Presumably this is relative to porn abstainers

[WillKemp]

I watched a TED talk about the effect of pornography on the male brain and the presenter described how difficult it was for him to find control subjects for his study.

That suggests that they've got their idea of "control" back to front.

Re:Correlation does not imply causation

[mod prime]

It's a technical paper in a medical journal. The intended audience doesn't need to be taught the fundamentals of statistics. That's why it was 'left out'.

Re:Do you give up higher cerebral function

[Anonymous Coward]

Much more importantly, the study found correlation to *self reported porn watching*. Thus it's much more likely what they found was reverse correlation to willingness to lie, or any other number of social constructs.

Re:other things would be better, alcohol metabolis

[Samantha Wright]

That may call into question cause, but not consequence; if pursuing a drug addiction causes behavioural changes (which alcoholism certainly does, even when sober) then it is not unreasonable to assume some alteration in activity or structure of the striatum comes as a result of this. The paper cites previous work on the topic, saying that alcoholism (and drug addiction in general) is indeed correlated with changes in the striatum, so I wouldn't really question that part of it too vigorously. My complaint is basically that they seem to be violating a triangle inequality: the brain change is tightly correlated with two addictive behaviours in the sample, but they're only weakly correlated with each other. It sounds to me like porn is correlated with novel changes in the same region.