What role does pornography?
The brain activity seen in people who have a sex addiction is very similar to that seen in drug addicts. A new study describes this similarity and whether pornography is or is not addictive. Find out.
Drug addicts and sex addicts have something in common: what moves is the compulsion to stimulate the brain's reward system in extreme form, which leads them to adopt obsessive and destructive behaviors. They are addicted to the feelings that produce them to see an erotic image, take the extreme sexual practices, have relations with several people and find pornography all the time. This is because they love the feeling that produces them because these activities stimulate the production of a chemical in the brain which in turn, will cause a feeling of satisfaction that must be constantly fed.
It is estimated that one in 25 adults suffer from sex addiction , which can significantly affect a person 's life at all levels: interpersonal relationships has been shown to increase stress and feelings of guilt.
A recent study by the University of Cambridge and published in the journal PLOS ONE found that pornography stimulates brain activity of people with compulsive sexual behavior or sex addicts, just as happens with drugs in the brain junkies. However, experts say this does not necessarily mean that pornography, in itself, is addictive.
To reach these conclusions, researchers at the Department of Psychiatry at the university, observed the brain activity of 19 male patients suffering from compulsive sexual behavior and compared it with the same number of healthy patients.
Those who were sex addicts had begun to view pornography from their earliest age. The first had great difficulty controlling their compulsive sexual behavior to the extent that they affect their daily lives and researchers interested in them because their behavior shows similarities with that of patients addicted to drugs. So they wanted to find out if brain activity also had those similarities.
By teaching videos explicit sexual content and analyze their brain activity using magnetic resonance imaging, researchers found that certain regions of the brain were more active in sex addicts than in healthy patients. In addition, they found that these regions are the same that are activated in drug addicts when stimulated by any of these substances or the idea of them.
Specifically, these regions of the brain are responsible for motivation and rewards, strong desires and to process the importance of events and emotions.
In addition, a relationship between brain activity and age were found: younger patients responded more evident brain activity to pornography.
The researchers say that the differences between the brain activity of sex addicts and those who are not, are very marked and closely resemble that of drug addicts. However, they warn that these similarities need to be investigated further to really understand the relationship between compulsive sexual behavior and drug addiction.
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