Saturday, April 21, 2012

Porn shuts down women's brains: Study

According to a new study from researchers at the University of Groningen Medical Center in the Netherlands, watching porn dulls a part of the brain in heterosexual women. (Shutterstock) According to a new study from researchers at the University of 
Groningen Medical Center in the Netherlands, watching porn dulls a part 
of the brain in heterosexual women. (Shutterstock)

Have you ever heard that watching porn will melt your brain or make you go blind? Well, it's true. Sort of.
A recent study found that watching porn dulls a part of the brain. And ironically, it's the part responsible for processing visual stimuli.
Or at least, that's what happens when straight women watch porn.
The researchers at the University of Groningen Medical Center in the Netherlands scanned the primary visual cortexes of 12 healthy heterosexual premenopausal women while showing them porn.
They found that watching actors get hot and heavy led to less blood being sent to the primary visual cortex. And the more explicit the video, the less blood they got.
That's the opposite of what usually happens when people watch TV and movies. In fact, the same women saw an increase of blood the visual cortex when they were shown a video about marine life in the Caribbean.
The researchers posit that the brain is more focused on the arousal than the actual video, and decides it doesn't really need to see every detail.
"If you look, for example, at your computer and you have to write something or whatever, then you have to look specifically and carefully at what you're doing because if you don't, it means you make mistakes," Uroneurologist Gert Holstege told LiveScience.
"But the moment you are watching explicit sexual movies, that's not necessary, because you know exactly what's going on. It's not important that the door is green or yellow.
"You have to realize that the brain wants to spare as much energy as possible, so if some part of the brain is not necessary at a high level of functioning, it immediately goes down."

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