Men who watch a lot of porn have less grey matter, study suggests
Researchers found less grey matter in the brains of men who watched large amounts of sexually explicit material, according to a new study. The research could not determine if porn actually caused the brain to shrink or whether men with such brains were predisposed to watching it, prompting the authors to call for additional study on the topic.
Researchers found less grey matter in the brains of men who watched large amounts of sexually explicit material, according to a new study.
The research could not determine if porn actually caused the brain to shrink or whether men with such brains were predisposed to watching it, prompting the authors to call for additional study on the topic.
"Future studies should investigate the effects of pornography longitudinally or expose naive participants to pornography and investigate the causal effects over time," said researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Germany.
They were told during a later phone interview that questions about pornography would be part of the research, and none dropped out.
Participants filled out surveys, describing how much porn they watched. Their responses averaged a little more than four hours per week.
The men's brains were scanned with MRI technology while they were shown sexually explicit images from porn websites, along with non-sexual images of people exercising.
"Our findings indicated that grey matter volume of the right caudate of the striatum is smaller with higher pornography use," said the study.
Furthermore, when sexually explicit material was shown, the men's MRIs showed diminished function in a part of the brain that processes motivation.
But were men with smaller striatums seeking more porn, or did more porn make the brain smaller? Was it a consequence, or a precondition?
"Individuals with lower striatum volume may need more external stimulation to experience pleasure and might therefore experience pornography consumption as more rewarding, which may in turn lead to" more porn watching, said the authors, concluding that more study is needed.
