If You Take A Break From Watching Porn, This Happens - 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 people if you enjoyed that then press here for the full unedited episode and don't forget to subscribe peace