This guy doubts the brain science of porn addiction...

For anyone interested in digging deeper, this is the study Dr. Ley is referencing: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/snp.v3i0.20770.

This is another researcher responding to the study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/snp.v4.23833

I've only had time to skim both articles so far, so I can't comment on the arguments they make yet (and most of the neurology speak is over my head).

There have been studies showing a connection, but most of the ones I've found were published after the Steele et al. article. The concept of heavy porn use leading to sexual dysfunction is such a recent one that researchers are still arguing over whether it's real or not. It can take many years and dozens or hundreds of peer-reviewed studies for them to reach a consensus.

 

it's a clickbait

 

I don't care what these quacks say, at the end of the day if gambling online can be addictive so can high speed internet porn. Why do people then spend multiple hours in one sitting looking at the most explicit and degrading content? Why is it that when they can SEE infront of them their lives falling apart, missing appointments, not turning up for work, neglecting their partners that they continue to watch porn in favour of these things?. I've personally called in sick for work before just to stay in and watch internet porn and use drugs, and i've turned down going to a good friends stag party (one of the most important and meaningful days of his life) so i could stay in and watch porn and i've progressed on to some of the most disgusting and illegal content through years and years of viewing porn and i never started out with that intention because when i was 14 and looking at my first naughty picture on the internet i just thought the content would always be like that nobody told me that porn addiction can be progressive or that porn addiction is even a thing.

Why does Cocaine and porn work so well together? (I know because i've tried !) because they activate the same areas of the brain and it HAS been proven in studies since this dated 2013 article.

To quote the article:
"The problem is, there has been extremely little research that actually looks at the brains and behaviors of people using porn, and no good, experimental research that has looked at the brains of those who are allegedly addicted to porn. So, all of these arguments are theoretical, and based on rhetoric, inferences and applying other research findings to try to explain sexual behaviors"

What he means is 'I haven't bothered to find any research that actually looks at the brains and behaviours of people using porn and i'd rather push my own idea based on 2 studies of which the biggest sample size was 52 people so it must be right'

 

Really, not everyone who watches porn is going to have problems with it in the same way that not everyone who has a brandy is going to become a raging alcoholic or the guy who like to bet on the horses now and again probably doesn't have a gambling problem. But! if you have an addictive nature, are compulsive and tend to medicate yourself through things like drugs because of trauma or just bad environment then yeah porn can become a serious problem. What i don't like about this guys article is that he doesn't acknowledge that there are people who have a problem with their porn use. Yes some people, their problem might just be to do with shame or some kind of stigma but for others who feel 'not in control' any more and who are genuinely afraid of what they are going to do next then they need help not (Swear words i can't type on here) like this who peddle some 'porn is great nothing to see here' kind of crap

 

Ooh that guy again. A lot of his claims have been refuted, but IMO It's simple. If you have an issue with PMO it's obvious to detox.

 

If these people think pornography doesn't cause major issues psychologically, then holy crap. I guess nothings wrong when you go to one of those sites to be instantly advertised some incest upon arrival.

"Nothings wrong here, there are no clear indicators that pornography will cause long lasting damage or even spiral into a horrible condition; these men living in their parents basement with their posters of asian cartoon styled bestiality or CP, it's completely normal. My god if I have to hear one more time just how people are overcoming their 'pornography addictions' it will drive me insane, luckily I'll never leave my room because of complete social isolation so HAHA I'll just troll with my biased research."

That's just me mocking/translating clear blinded stupidity. The f***ing harm it does to people is as clear as day

 

Not that again. David Ley's article isn't what you think.
From into of long article YBOP -

Some years ago, David Ley and study spokesperson Nicole Prause teamed up to write a Psychology Today blog post about Steele et al., 2013 called "Your Brain on Porn - It's NOT Addictive". The blog post appeared 5 months before Prause's EEG study was formally published. Its oh-so-catchy title is misleading as it has nothing to do with Your Brain on Porn or the neuroscience presented there. Instead, David Ley’s March, 2013 blog post limits itself to a single flawed EEG study - Steele et al., 2013.
Update: In this 2018 presentation Gary Wilson exposes the truth behind 5 questionable and misleading studies, including this study (Steele et al., 2013): Porn Research: Fact or Fiction?

David Ley is the author of The Myth of Sex Addiction, and he religiously denies both sex and porn addiction. Ley has written 30 or so blog posts attacking porn-recovery forums, and dismissing porn addiction and porn-induced ED. Ley & Prause not only teamed up to write Ley's Psychology Today blog post about Steele et al., 2013, they later joined forces to publish a 2014 paper dismissing porn addiction.

We often see Ley's Psychology Today blog post referenced in debates about porn addiction. While many cite it as their primary evidence debunking the existence of porn addiction, few have any idea what Steele et al., 2013 actually reported. If indiscriminate Google searches is all you have, this is what you post. In reality, Prause's 2013 EEG study actually supports the porn addiction model and did not find what the Ley or Prause claims that it did. Five peer-reviewed analyses of Steele et al. 2013 describe how the Steele et al. findings lend support to the porn addiction model. The papers are in accord with the YBOP critique in that we all agree that Steele et al. actually found the following:

• Frequent porn users had greater cue-reactivity (higher EEG readings) to sexual images relative to neutral pictures (same as drug addicts do when exposed to cues related their addiction).
• Individuals with greater cue-reactivity to porn had less desire for sex with a partner (but not lower desire to masturbate to porn). This is a sign of both sensitization and desensitization.

Three of the papers also describe the study's flawed methodology and unsubstantiated conclusions. Paper #1 is solely devoted to Steele et al., 2013. Papers 2, 3, 4 & 5 contain sections analyzing Steele et al., 2013:

1. ‘High Desire’, or ‘Merely’ An Addiction? A Response to Steele et al. (2013), by Donald L. Hilton, Jr., MD
2. Neural Correlates of Sexual Cue Reactivity in Individuals with and without Compulsive Sexual Behaviours (2014), by Valerie Voon, Thomas B. Mole, Paula Banca, Laura Porter, Laurel Morris, Simon Mitchell, Tatyana R. Lapa, Judy Karr, Neil A. Harrison, Marc N. Potenza, and Michael Irvine
3. Neuroscience of Internet Pornography Addiction: A Review and Update (2015), by Todd Love, Christian Laier, Matthias Brand, Linda Hatch & Raju Hajela
4. Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports (2016), by Brian Y. Park, Gary Wilson , Jonathan Berger, Matthew Christman, Bryn Reina, Frank Bishop, Warren P. Klam and Andrew P. Doan
5. Conscious and Non-Conscious Measures of Emotion: Do They Vary with Frequency of Pornography Use? (2017) by Sajeev Kunaharan, Sean Halpin, Thiagarajan Sitharthan, Shannon Bosshard, and Peter Walla

Note: Over 25 studies falsify the claim that sex & porn addicts "just have high sexual desire". This is important as Prause claimed that her subjects simply had higher libidos (but they didn't, as you will see below).

 

Hard to argue brain scans done on porn addicts. They look exactly like heroine addicts brains.

 

The 2013 David Ley article is just a lie. The subject's brains in the Nicole Pruase study responded exactly like drug addicts. Here's more from under a Nicole Prause interview on Psychology Today about the EEG study.....

Prause's claims that subjects "brains did not respond like other addicts" is without support. This assertion is nowhere to be found in the actual study. It's only found in Prause's interviews. In this study subjects had higher EEG (P300) readings when viewing sexual images - which is exactly what occurs when addicts view images related to their addiction (as in this study on cocaine addicts). Commenting under the Psychology Today interview of Prause, senior psychology professor emeritus John A. Johnson said:

"My mind still boggles at the Prause claim that her subjects' brains did not respond to sexual images like drug addicts' brains respond to their drug, given that she reports higher P300 readings for the sexual images. Just like addicts who show P300 spikes when presented with their drug of choice. How could she draw a conclusion that is the opposite of the actual results? I think it could be due to her preconceptions--what she expected to find."​

John A. Johnson continues:

Mustanski asks, "What was the purpose of the study?" And Prause replies, "Our study tested whether people who report such problems [problems with regulating their viewing of online erotica] look like other addicts from their brain responses to sexual images."

But the study did not compare brain recordings from persons having problems regulating their viewing of online erotica to brain recordings from drug addicts and brain recordings from a non-addict control group, which would have been the obvious way to see if brain responses from the troubled group look more like the brain responses of addicts or non-addicts.

Instead, Prause claims that their within-subject design was a better method, where research subjects serve as their own control group. With this design, they found that the EEG response of their subjects (as a group) to erotic pictures was stronger than their EEG responses to other kinds of pictures. This is shown in the inline waveform graph (although for some reason the graph differs considerably from the actual graph in the published article).

So this group who reports having trouble regulating their viewing of online erotica has a stronger EEG response to erotic pictures than other kinds of pictures. Do addicts show a similarly strong EEG response when presented with their drug of choice? We don't know. Do normal, non-addicts show a response as strong as the troubled group to erotica? Again, we do not know. We don't know whether this EEG pattern is more similar to the brain patterns of addicts or non-addicts.

The Prause research team claims to be able to demonstrate whether the elevated EEG response of their subjects to erotica is an addictive brain response or just a high-libido brain response by correlating a set of questionnaire scores with individual differences in EEG response. But explaining differences in EEG response is a different question from exploring whether the overall group's response looks addictive or not.​