Porn — The super-stimulus of the 21st century? [Part 1]
Introduction
Hello everyone. This is the beginning of a series of blog posts where I will delve into topics like spirituality, philosophy, religion, materialism, and how they affect our daily lives. In the midst of our fast-paced lives, we often forget to enjoy life to its fullest, and may even find ourselves questioning ourselves — “why am I even doing this?”. In this blog, I’ll write about how to take a step back and introspect about the things that we usually take for granted.
The reason for choosing this topic as the first post is because my interest in this topic took me down the rabbit hole of how porn can affect us. We humans are short-sighted creatures, and a lot of us don’t even worry about something having long term effects if it gives us short-term pleasure. A lot of these events become the cause of internal misery in our lives without us even realizing it. Porn has become a widespread phenomenon in today’s lives. People watch it for various reasons — mostly out of sheer boredom. However, modern-day porn presents a problem that only a few of us are aware of. To identify this problem, we need to look at what a supernormal stimulus (superstimulus) is.
[Note]: This is a rather long topic. Therefore, I have segmented this blog into three parts. In the first part, I’ll introduce you to what makes porn an addiction, in the second part, we’ll look at the science of it and in the last part I’ll share some pointers on how to quit porn, about famous people who have quit porn, and an Eastern take on this topic.
What is a supernormal stimulus?
The human brain (and other animals too) has been neurologically evolved to look out for stimulus. A superstimulus, as the name suggests, is an exaggerated version of a stimulus to which there is an existing response tendency. Superstimulus is a topic of interest in biology, sociology, psychology, and arts. Examples of superstimuli are junk foods, which are exaggerated stimuli to cravings for salt and sugar.
The brain’s reward circuitry
Our brain has a reward circuitry that intrinsically rewards us for seeking the stimuli that are required to survive. When exposed to a rewarding stimulus, our brain produces a neurotransmitter called dopamine. Dopamine reinforces the pathways in the brain that encourage us to repeat the activity again to receive the rewarding stimulus. Naturally, our brain releases healthy amounts of dopamine when we eat, exercise, take rest, and so on. These activities influence our survival directly or indirectly, and the motivation to ensure our survival is provided by our own brain in the form of dopamine. We are evolved to seek activities that release dopamine and other neurotransmitters. However, this reward circuitry can be hijacked, either directly or indirectly. For example, this study that tried to hijack the reward centers of rats by pressing a lever to stimulate the brain. They had the following conclusion:
The results indicate that various places exist in the brain “where electrical stimulation is rewarding in the sense that the experimental animal will stimulate itself in these places frequently and regularly for long periods of time if permitted to do so.”
In fact, one of the rats in their experiment pressed the button around 10 times a minute to stimulate itself. This experiment shows that the reward circuitry can be hijacked by providing electrical stimulation to the brain.
Maximum dopamine wins
The study showed that the reward center can be hijacked externally using electrodes. However, the reward circuitry can also be hijacked by providing abnormal amounts of dopamine to the brain. Since dopamine is the “currency” of rewards that the brain gets, the brain will seek to do activities that give us the maximum amount of dopamine. The most important natural stimuli that humans seek are food and sex. Food is required to survive and sex is required to extend the gene pool. What happens when these stimuli are exaggerated?
When it comes to food, sugar is a natural stimulus that we seek because sugary foods are indicative of higher energy (due to high calorie content) and sugar was a scarce resource. However, in the current scenario, we have refined sugar which is much sweeter than natural sugary foods (e.g. sugarcane) and is available more readily. The massive amounts of sweetness provide larger dopamine bursts than natural sugars do, hence making refined sugar very addictive. In fact, the sugar industry has largely exploited this superstimulus to its advantage by getting people hooked to excessively sweet foods (more on that later).
Similarly, all sexually reproducing organisms (including humans) crave for sex. Not just that, humans look for cues in potential mates so that the best genes are passed on to their offspring. For example, in a cross-cultural study, Doyle and Pazhoohi showed that surgically augmented breasts are supernormal stimuli, and they are more attractive than natural breasts, regardless of their size. This suggests that humans also look for cues in “potential mates” so that the best genes are passed on to their offspring.
Why porn is a superstimulus
Porn is a rather recent invention, speaking from an evolutionary standpoint. Porn is considered a superstimulus because it provides you one-click access to a lot of images and videos, and our primal brains cannot distinguish between a nude person in front of you and a nude person on a screen. In real life, we can achieve nowhere near the number of sexual partners as we can do in porn (by watching a new video every day). As we lookout for new porn videos every day, our primal brain thinks that we are mating with a new partner every time, which is not the kind of stimuli our brain has been evolved to handle. We also know that actors in modern porn have surgically-enhanced features to give our brain subtle cues that we are “mating” with an ideal “mate”. That makes porn a lot more addictive in nature. If you are not convinced that the brain cannot distinguish between a real person and fake images on a screen, consider the following argument. Since our brains know what is real and what isn’t, we would also not be scared of horror movies since we know that everything is happening on a screen and is therefore fake. In fact, the entire entertainment industry would go out of business if our primal brains could differentiate between real events and events happening on a screen (although our conscious brain knows that the stimulus is fake). Watching porn, therefore, gives us an illusion of having sex, and your reward center is abused with regular consumption of porn since your reward center fires up every time you encounter the stimulus of a “new mate”.
Porn — A unique drug
Most drugs we know of today work by primarily exploiting the reward circuit to produce large surges of dopamine, therefore making us crave for more. Since porn provides higher doses of dopamine than normal stimuli provide, it can be technically called a drug. However, it is different from other drugs in the following ways:
- Easy and free access: Online porn is always a click away from our computers and smartphones unlike other drugs. Most porn is also free and unrestricted, which exposes it to vulnerable groups like teenagers whose brains are most susceptible to addiction because young brains have more plasticity than adult brains.
- Less physical ramifications: Unlike abuse of other drugs, porn doesn’t seem to have any physical toll on the body, apart from lethargy and lack of motivation. This makes most people think that porn abuse is not real since there is no apparent adverse effect of using it.
- Usage of porn is normalized in today’s society: Porn has been endorsed by many people as “healthy” with little to no scientific investigation on the long term effects that regular porn viewing can cause. Studies which are in favor of porn use (most of which are very outdated) only emphasize on the short-term stress-relieving effects and conclude that watching porn is healthy.
Porn satisfies a lot of criteria for becoming an addiction as far as abuse of the reward center is concerned. In the next part of the blog, I will show some of the science for and against porn use, and see if there are bigger forces at play. Thank you for reading!
