What Actually Happens When Your Brain Forgets Porn - Dr. Andrew Huberman

[0:00]there's an additional issue with pornography which is not often discussed, which is that remember guys in particular, the brain is a learning prediction machine and if I'm not trying to say that all pornography is bad, but there are good data to support the idea that if your brain learns to be aroused by watching other people have sex, it is not necessarily going to carry over to the ability to get aroused when you're one-on-one with somebody else, right? The especially young kids who are consuming a lot of pornography, the brain is learning sexual arousal to other people having sex. So you're going to program yourself into being a voyeur. Or yeah, or just create challenges in in sexual interactions with, you know, with with peers, with a with a real partner, right? Mary Harrington has the three laws of pornodynamics, and the second law of pornodynamics is the law of fap entropy. And it says that whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more intense over time. And I think that this is sort of speaking to that ever, ever sort of escalating amount of um, the wildness that you need to watch in order to get an ever decreasing stimulus that comes back. Yeah, and you know, here I'm I'm approaching this only through the lens of biology, right? I'm not a, you know, I'm not a psychologist and I'm certainly not um political in it in any way, at least not I have ideas about politics, but I just don't discuss them publicly. But the but the idea here is that, you know, I'm not saying pornography as a stimulus is bad or good. What I'm saying is it in its availability and its extreme forms, it's a very potent stimulus and very potent stimuli of any kind, extremely palatable food, extreme pornography, um extreme experiences like bungee jumping. Those set a threshold for dopamine release and Anna will tell you that and I'm sure she did that the higher the dopamine peak, the bigger the drop afterwards, and it's not that you drop to baseline, you drop below baseline. So again, it's not these things aren't good or bad, they just have to be controlled in a way because when people are pursuing dopamine peaks over and over and over and they aren't getting them. Typically, it's because they've been pursuing that activity far too often. And you're saying perhaps take a break from that and then maybe an ability for yourself your system to reset. Right, yeah. Yeah, I mean, in theory all the things that we're talking about with pornography could be superposed onto food or could be superposed onto real sex, right? Um that one also has to be cautious there, right? But the cycling back and forth between dopamine and low dopamine states, dopamine fasting as it were, but maybe just low dopamine states. These are natural rhythms that exist in the nervous system. We have to remember what the dopaminergic system is there for. I'll say it again, I wasn't consulted in the design phase, but we know as a as a generic form of motivation and pursuit. You can imagine the human or the animal that's hungry or thirsty. It needs energy to go pursue the thing. So the idea that you have to eat in order to get energy, that's true, but you need energy in order to get the thing to eat. So our nervous system has energy also. That's dopamine and epinephrin. Yes, we use glucose and glycogen, et cetera when we're pursuing things. But the idea here is you're pursuing something and then either by smell or by sight, you think you're on the right track. So you go down that track and then ah, there it is, you know, you get some berries or you get, you know, let's get prehistoric about this, or you get to kill the prey and eat it. And then it gives you energy to continue this pursuit or to reproduce. I mean, there's a reason why humans and other animals seek out reproduction is that every every species, but certainly humans have two innate desires built into them. Whether or not they decide to actualize this or not, is the desire to protect young and make more of its own species. Every successful species does that. Even if people don't have children in general, people care about children because they of what they represent. What's happening, people? If you enjoyed that, then press here for the full unedited episode. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.