Your Brain on Porn (13 page)

Why am I telling you about DeltaFosB? Unlikely as it may seem, this single neurobiological discovery dismantles the claim that porn addiction does not exist. DeltaFosB accumulating in the reward centre of the brain is now considered to be a sustained molecular switch for both behavioural and chemical addictions.

What does DeltaFosB
do
as it accumulates? It turns on a very specific set of genes that physically and chemically alter the reward centre
.[130]
Think of dopamine as the foreman on a construction site barking the orders and DeltaFosB as the construction workers who actually pour the cement.

Dopamine is yelling, ‘This activity is really, really important, and you should do it again and again.’ DeltaFosB’s job, as the construction worker, is to have you
remember and repeat
the activity.

It does this by rewiring your brain to want ‘it’, ‘it’ being whatever you have been bingeing on. A spiral can ensue in which wanting leads to doing, doing triggers more surges of dopamine, dopamine causes DeltaFosB to accumulate – and the urge to repeat the behaviour gets stronger with each loop.

When you think, ‘Nerve cells that fire together wire together’, think DeltaFosB.

Wiring together everything associated with porn use to hammer your reward circuitry via specially constructed pathways so that you crave porn is known as
sensitisation.
And if DeltaFosB

continues to build up it can also bring about
desensitisation
, that is, you experience a numbed response to everyday pleasures. Desensitisation is a reduction in the brain's sensitivity to dopamine.

[131]
All of the brain changes initiated by DeltaFosB tend to keep us overconsuming or, in the case of internet porn, riveted to what the brain perceives as a Fertilization Fest.

This set of neurochemical dominoes certainly did not evolve to create addicts. It evolved to urge animals to ‘Get it while the getting is good.’ But the point is that the mechanism of elevated dopamine leading to DeltaFosB accumulation is the same mechanism that initiates
both
sexual conditioning
and
addiction. Both start with a Pavlovian super-memory of pleasure (sensitization), which then triggers powerful ‘do it again!’ urges. Porn users would be naive to imagine that they are impervious to this biological process.

The obvious question is: ‘How much is too much?’ The answer is simple: ‘whatever amount of

stimulation causes the accumulation of DeltaFosB and corresponding addiction-related brain changes.’ That will differ for each viewer, so questions such as ‘does this visual count as porn?’

or ‘how much porn use will cause addiction?’ are misguided. The former is like asking whether it's slot machines or blackjack that causes gambling addiction. The latter is like asking an obese junk-food addict how many minutes she spends eating.

The fact is, the brain's reward centre doesn't know what porn is. It only registers levels of stimulation through dopamine spikes.
[132]
The mysterious interaction between the individual viewer's brain and the chosen stimuli determines whether or not a viewer slips into addiction.

Interestingly, some people who claim not to be addicted, and who can quit with relative ease, still experience severe sexual dysfunctions related to their porn use
[133]
: delayed ejaculation, erectile dysfunction, inability to orgasm during sex or loss of attraction to real partners. It's likely that the brain changes associated with sexual conditioning are behind their symptoms.

Dopamine is odd. It shoots up when something is better than expected (violates expectations), but drops when expectations are not met.
[134]
With sex, it's nearly impossible to match internet porn's level of surprise, variety and novelty. Thus, once a young man thoroughly conditions himself to porn, sex may not meet his unconscious expectations. Unmet expectations produce a
drop
in dopamine – and erections. (A steady stream of dopamine surges is imperative for sustaining sexual arousal and erections.)

Adolescents are especially vulnerable here because their reward circuitry is in overdrive
.[135]

In response to internet novelty it produces higher spikes of dopamine. It is also more sensitive to dopamine
[136]
and their brains produce more DeltaFos
B[137]
(to ‘remember and repeat’). As a consequence, the teen brain can deeply condition itself to internet porn with surprising ease, such that real sex truly feels like an alien experience to some. Learning pleasurable sex then requires months longer than it does for men who grew up without the internet and conditioned themselves to actual partners first. The latter are simply relearning.

The adolescent brain's over-sensitivity to reward also means its owner is more vulnerable to addiction
.[138]
And if that's not scary enough, remember that a natural sculpting process narrows a teen's choices by adulthood
.[139]
His brain prunes his neural circuitry to leave him with well-honed responses to life.
[140]
By his twenties, he may not exactly be
stuck
with the sexual conditioning he falls into during adolescence, but it can be like a deep rut in his brain – less easy to ignore or reconfigure.

Isolating Cause and Effect

Addiction naysayers generally insist that porn users who develop problems all had pre-existing conditions, such as depression, childhood trauma or OCD. They insist that excessive porn use is the
result,
not the cause, of their problems. Of course, some porn users do have pre-existing issues and will need additional support.

However, the implication that everyone else can use internet porn without risk of developing symptoms is not supported by research. For example, in a rare longitudinal study (tracking young internet users over time) researchers found that ‘young people who are initially free of mental health problems but use the Internet pathologically’ develop depression at 2.5 times the rate of those who don't engage in such use.
[141]
(Researchers had also adjusted for potential confounding factors.)

A year later, a fascinating experiment, which would be impossible to duplicate in the West, began when Chinese researchers measured the mental health of incoming students.
[142]
A subset of these students had never spent time on the internet before arriving at university. A year later, scientists evaluated the internet newbies' mental health again. Fifty-nine of them had already developed internet addiction. Said the researchers:

After their addiction, significantly higher scores were observed for dimensions on

depression, anxiety, hostility, interpersonal sensitivity, and psychoticism, suggesting that
these were outcomes of Internet addiction disorder.

The researchers compared the before and after scores on mental health in the newbie addicts and

found that internet addiction seemed to have
caused
significant changes in their mental health. From the study:

- Before they were addicted to the Internet, the scores of depression, anxiety, and hostility for students with Internet addiction were lower than the norm.

- After their addiction
(one year later)
, the dimensions ... increased significantly,
suggesting that
depression, anxiety, and hostility
were outcomes of
Internet addiction
, and not
precursors for
Internet addiction. (emphasis added)

Said the researchers:

We cannot find a solid pathological predictor for Internet addiction disorder. Internet
addiction disorder may bring some pathological problems to the addicts.

This study suggests that the students' internet habits
caused
their psychological symptoms. More recently, Taiwanese researchers showed that there is a correlation between teen suicide

ideation/attempt and internet addiction, even after controlling for depression, self-esteem, family support, and demographics.
[143]

In another study, Chinese researchers confirmed that while high-risk internet abusers exhibit definite signs of depression (such as loss of interest, aggressive behaviour, depressive mood, and guilt feelings), they show little evidence of a permanent depressive trait
.[144]
In other words, their symptoms apparently stem from their internet abuse, not underlying, pre-existing characteristics.

Just recently, Chinese researchers measured depression, hostility, social anxiety and internet addiction in 2,293 7th graders
twice
, a year apart.
[145]
Those who had become addicts exhibited increased depression and hostility compared with the non-addicted group. Further, those who began as addicts but were no longer addicted at the end of the year showed decreased depression, hostility, and social anxiety compared with those who remained addicted.

Even more recently, Belgian researchers assessed 14-year old boys' academic performance at two points in time. They found that ‘an increased use of Internet pornography decreased boys’

academic performance six months later.’
[146]

These findings are consistent with the results informally reported by thousands of recovery forum members who quit porn and experience benefits in mood, motivation, academic performance, social

anxiety,
etc.
Their severe symptoms, followed by noticeable improvements, undermine the assertion that internet problems arise only in people with pre-existing disorders or characteristics.

More on Porn-Induced Sexual Dysfunctions

Research reveals that erections require adequate dopamine in the reward circui
t[147]
and
the male sexual centres of the brain
.[148]
Not long ago, Italian researchers scanned the brains of guys with ‘psychogenic ED’ (as opposed to ‘organic ED’, which arises from issues below the belt). Their scans revealed atrophy of the grey matter in the brain's reward centre (nucleus accumbens) and the sexual centres of the hypothalamus
.[149]
Loss of grey matter equates with loss of nerve cell branches and connections with other nerve cells. Here, this translates into reduced dopamine signalling (reduced arousal). It's like your 8-cylinder engine is now sputtering along on only 3 cylinders.

The study is evidence that psychogenic ED is
not
always caused by an individual's state of mind at a particular moment. It can be a consequence of changes to the reward circuitry that result in persistently reduced dopamine signalling. This could help explain porn-induced sexual dysfunctions, such as erectile dysfunction, delayed ejaculation and inability to climax at all during intercourse – and why such symptoms generally require weeks or months to reverse.

The Italian finding is consistent with findings in the new German study on porn users published in
JAMA Psychiatry
.
[150]
Both studies show less grey matter in the reward circuitry. In the German study, subjects who used the most porn had less grey matter and showed less arousal to sexy pictures.

To answer the age-old question, size does matter, at least when it comes to grey matter.

As mentioned earlier, guys who started out on highspeed internet porn typically need months longer to recover their sexual health than guys forty and older. Loss of grey matter in the reward circuitry (desensitisation) appears to play a role in porn-induced erectile dysfunction, but the fact that young guys often need longer to recover points to deep sexual conditioning during adolescence.

Desensitisation and other brain changes arising from chronic overconsumption can be picked up in brain scans, but sexual conditioning doesn't show up in pictures of the brain. Confirmation of this effect must come through self-reports of symptoms and recoveries.

As we saw earlier, adolescence is a key developmental window during which mammalian brains

are primed to adapt their mating behaviour to arousing cues in the environment. Thereafter, brains begin to prune away unused circuitry – perhaps the very circuitry related to the pursuit of real partners that these guys' adolescent ancestors would have developed and strengthened as a matter of course.
[151]
Here's a typical account of a younger guy who had thoroughly wired his sexuality to internet porn:

What you're likely wondering is, ‘For the love of god does the ED get better or am I
torturing myself for no reason?!’ I wondered that too. The answer is 'Kind of,' then 'Yes!' What
you're likely going to experience once you do engage in sex is your brain saying, ‘what the