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

there's 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

especially young kids who are consuming

a lot of pornography the brain is

learning

sexual arousal to

other people having so you're going to

program yourself into being a voice

or yeah or just create challenges in in

sexual interactions with you know with

with peers with a with a real partner

mary harrington has the three laws of

porno dynamics and the second law of

porno dynamics 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

extreme experiences like bungee cord

jumping those set a threshold for

dopamine release and ana 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 a

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 superimposed

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 existed in the nervous system we

had to remember what the dopaminergic

system is there for

i'll say it again i wasn't consulted the

design phase but we know as a as a

generic form of motivation in 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 epinephrine

yes we use glucose and glycogen etc 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 very

few people dislike children i mean there

are a few mutants out there that dislike

children but you always worry about

those kinds of people what's happening

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peace