Watching Porn Is A Much Less Visual Activity Than We Thought

While couples who watch porn together may be better off commitment-wise, new research has discovered that pornography "quiets" the brain. In other words, your brain, at least the part the processes visual stimuli, pretty much shuts off when you flip on the adult-only channel. It's not exactly the end of the world, since you don't really need to use your brain while visually engaging in erotica, but it's still rather distressing for those of us who waste hours a day watching the plumber in his tool belt trying to "fix the pipes" of some lonely housewife.

It seems that while other visual tasks, such as working or even watching a non-porn movie, send blood to the region of the brain that handles visual stimuli, the dirty stuff has the opposite effect. Apparently not only does the brain pretty much know what's coming next ("why, yes, this is where the fornication begins") but it doesn't need to pay attention to specifics like the wallpaper pattern or the color of the floor in the movie, because it's not central to what's going on.

The study took 12 healthy premenopausal women and put them to the test. Each woman watched three videos while their brains were scanned: a documentary about marine life, a "soft-core" porn for the ladies, and an all-out hard-core flick. The hard-core porn, compared with both of the other videos, not only initiated a stronger physical arousal in the women, but also "resulted in far less blood being sent to the primary visual cortex." This effect is usually only seen in those who are asked to perform a task that does not involve a visual element because it's unnecessary to the project at hand, such as remembering words.

What does this all mean? Porn is rotting your brain! Or, if we're to be less dramatic about it but still relatively accurate, your brain focuses far more on the sexual arousal part of the equation than on processing the visual aspects that come with pornography. Even if you do happen to benefit from watching porn by learning a new sexual position, the fact remains that watching it isn't doing your brain any favors. Why don't you flip through the Kama Sutra and try all the positions instead?

What do you think about this porn study?

Watching Porn Is A Much Less Visual Activity Than We Thought

Is pornography bad for your brain? Not exactly, but it does shut off certain parts of it.

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