The articles in this section help you understand the basic mechanisms behind Internet porn addiction. Learn how your brain’s evolved design makes it easy to get hooked on Internet porn. I suggest reading the first three articles below before moving on to other articles or sections.
Sexual brain training matters—especially during adolescence
During adolescence our brains furiously wire up our sexuality to whatever arousing cues are around—and then prune away unused circuitry.Thereafter it’s not as easy to reconfigure our courtship and mating behaviors or unlearn unwanted sexual associations.
Can dopamine receptors reveal clues about binging?
This article furnishes the basics to understand later articles, and explains why you evolved to find porn riveting. It teaches you about the reward circuitry and dopamine, which evolved to get you to have sex and eat. Internet porn can over-stimulate the reward circuitry, leading to a numbed pleasure response and cravings for even more sexual stimulation.
Without the Coolidge Effect there would be no Internet porn
The Coolidge Effect is an ancient biological program that can override your sluggish contentment after orgasm if there are new mates begging to be fertilized. This neurological mechanism perceives each new erotic possibility—including those on your screen—as a valuable genetic opportunity, and jolts you into action with potent neurochemicals.
The Coolidge Effect can trump our best intentions
This article explains the Coolidge Effect. It’s a primitive brain program designed to create more genetic variety in offspring. It urges animals to move on to new and different sexual partners. This mechanism drives porn use as you get a bigger buzz from each novel two-dimensional “mate.”
Article that Marnia and I wrote for the academic journal, “The Evolutionary Review”
“The collision of widespread internet porn use with man’s ancient mammalian brain constitutes one of the fastest-moving, most global experiments ever unconsciously conducted….”
Cyber erotica: Can pixels alleviate an evolutionary yearning?
“Dilbert’s” creator predicts that if people “continue their trend of getting fatter and more argumentative … the Digital Crossover [from human to cybersex] is less than ten years away.”
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