Neurotiede: tällä mekanismilla porno tuhoaa tunteet

Precisely how does it numb your emotions? Our brains evolved to strive for homeostasis. If we’re bombarded with intense stimulation they adjust. For example, they mute neural signals by changing nerve cell receptor levels for key neurotransmitters. Chronic overstimulation can thus lead to numbness.

By the same token, removing the overstimulation feels rotten at first (because daily life seems even more dull and meaningless), but gradually the numbness reverses itself. Colors return and enthusiasm increases.

Doug Lisle explains this brilliantly in his TEDx talk: The Pleasure Trap. He gives examples of how overeaters can reverse food cravings with periods of fasting or juice-only. The same principle of increasing sensitivity by avoiding overstimulation applies to all natural rewards, including masturbation to Internet porn. (Giving up masturbation to porn to experience this improvement is often called “rebooting.”)

An excellent website, which thoroughly explains the principles and techniques behind “changing your set point” in order to feel more balance and satisfaction, is Todd Becker’s www.gettingstronger.org. Listen to a radio interview with Todd.

Depression research also sheds light on this phenomenon of numbed emotions caused by overconsumption of stimulation, and we’ll look at this in more depth in a future post. For now, we’ll just point out that research reveals that dopamine supplies the motivation to respond to all salient stimuli, so when it’s low, less negative and positive emotional reactions are to be expected—because nothing feels worth bothering about.

Surely individual humans naturally express many different levels of sensitivity. However, it’s also evident from the word’s great art that human males apparently evolved to have a fairly wide emotional range.

Is our current conception of “normal male emotional health” distorted by the fact that heavy use of Internet porn is the norm among many men? Might today’s guys be showing us something less than their innate range of emotions simply because their brains have “down-regulated” in response to today’s hyper-erotic online smörgåsbords? (Women are beginning to report the same issues, by the way.)

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