It turns out that being a regular on Internet pornography can get you in trouble , and not just go blind or go to hell … rather affecting your brain. Christian Laier and his collaborators published a curious study last year after observing that some people who consume pornography on the Internet do not enjoy as much as would be expected, but instead complain of problems such as forgetting important appointments, abandoning work tasks or neglecting their partners, all of which significantly affect their lives. These complaints have to do with a cognitive function known as ‘working memory’.
This is an important ability in everyday activities such as having conversations with friends, cooking, or remembering pending appointments and commitments. The proper functioning of working memory is easily impaired by the interference of various factors , such as stress or depression, but the specific effect that pornographic content could have on it had not been investigated before.
The authors explain in their article published in The Journal of Sex Research how they conducted an experiment with 28 healthy heterosexual men who were given an ‘n-back’ task, consisting of saying whether or not a certain image presented is the same or not as another image that It was presented 4 positions before in a sequence. This type of task is used to evaluate the ability to maintain, manipulate and update information in working memory.
The experiment had four conditions depending on the type of images: a neutral one, with photographs of people doing things like walking down the street or working; another negative, where the photos showed scenes of people fighting or violent; the positive one, where people were seen laughing or in celebrations; and the ‘pornographic’ condition where photos of various sexual scenes between people of the same and different sex were presented. Participants were also asked to indicate the degree of sexual arousal produced by a series of 100 photographs with pornographic content and the need to masturbate they felt after viewing them.
The results showed that the participants performed significantly worse on the task with pornographic photographs (compared to neutral, positive and negative ones), committing fewer hits and more false alarms. In addition, this interference was greater the more sexually activating the photos were and the more desire for masturbation they caused in men. The authors thus demonstrate the negative role that sexual arousal caused by pornography has on working memory processes, arguing that it is possibly due to the fact that this type of stimuli captures many attention resources that would not be available to carry out other activities. important in the day to day.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
