Watching Too Much Indecency Shrinks Men’s Brains

Researchers have found less grey matter in the
brains of men who watched large amounts of
sexually explicit material, according to a new
study.
The research, which appeared in the journal JAMA
Psychiatry, could not determine if Indecency
actually caused the brain to shrink however, and
the authors called for additional study on the
topic.
"Future studies should investigate the effects of
Indecency longitudinally or expose naive
participants to Indecency and investigate the
causal effects over time," said researchers at the
Max Planck Institute for Human Development in
Berlin.
The institute recruited 64 male subjects aged
between 21 and 45, "with a broad range of
Indecency consumption".
The men were not told initially that the research
was monitoring their brains on Indecency, rather
that it was "a scientific study including magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) measurements".
The men filled out surveys, describing how much
Indecency they watched. Their responses
averaged a little more than four hours per week.
Their brains were scanned with MRI technology
while they were shown sexually explicit images
from Indecency websites, along with non-intimate
images of people exercising.
"Our findings indicated that gray matter volume of
the right caudate of the striatum is smaller with
higher Indecency use," said the study.
Furthermore, when sexually explicit material was
shown, the men's MRIs showed diminished
function in a part of the brain that processes
motivation.
But were men with smaller striatums seeking
more Indecency, or did more Indecency make the
brain smaller? Was it a consequence, or a
precondition?
"Individuals with lower striatum volume may need
more external stimulation to experience pleasure
and might therefore experience Indecency
consumption as more rewarding, which may in
turn lead to" more Indecency watching, said the
authors, concluding that more study is needed.