The Neuroscience of Porn
A few years ago the German lab Neuroimage released the results of a study looking at what happened in the minds of people who were shown porn images, whilst in an fMRI machine. The study found that;
“the ventral premotor cortex which is a key structure for imitative (mirror neurons) and tool-related (canonical neurons) actions showed a bilateral sexual preference-specific activation, suggesting that viewing sexually aroused genitals of the preferred sex triggers action representations of sexual behavior.” In other words, looking at still pictures of naked people triggered our mirror neurons into action, as the brain began pretending that it was actually having sex, and not just looking at smutty pictures in a science lab.
Porn, it seems, doesn’t cause us to think about sex. From a purely neurological point of view, the arousal of the viewer isn’t preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via the screen. Rather, the act is the idea. Porn works by triggering us to imagine that we’re having sex; the sex we’re having is the sex on the screen.
June 16th, 2009 at 4:22 am
fMRI scans showing the triggering of mirror neurons is fascinating and appears to be widespread across a number of different areas of human response, e.g. similar areas of the brain show activity when remembering music as when actually listening to it (Daniel J. Levitin (2006) This is Your Brain on Music). Vittorio Gallese’s (2003) “The roots of empathy: The shared manifold hypothesis and the neural basis of intersubjectivity is a good read. (Psychopathology, 36(4), 171-180). is also interesting. Porn is a great example. Do you know if any studies have been done on whether mirror neurons are triggered in other media events, e.g. watching films, playing videogames, interacting online in virtual worlds etc ?
June 16th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Yes, apparently they are triggered quite easily. So if you hear a sound effect in a film, for example, the event suggested by the sound relates to your own experience of it etc. But I was under the impression, and I have to stress that “bad science” is written at the top of this page for a reason, that the combination of the two types of neuron means that we are simulating an activity in our minds. There’s been a few studies on books, talking about how we build a simulation of the world described by the book in our heads, and that’s updated as new information is received. There was an interesting one on sports and TV, a study that looked at people watching the sport and then playing it. I mean, there’s probably tons of studies into this, but what interested me about this one on porn, is that these people were literally just shown a picture and in their minds they were immediately “having sex”. I wonder, if you showed a picture of a football to the same group of people, would they all imagine they’re kicking it? Maybe…
October 9th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
spasibo
October 10th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
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