Porn addiction and instrumental conditioning - What we share with mice

Hey everybody,

I study cognitive sciences in the university, so I decided to share my take on porn/masturbation addiction and why the only way to heal is to completely abstain from them.

In psychology there is a phenomenon called instrumental conditioning. It was first discovered by a behaviorist psychologist named Skinner. He showed that if you put a mouse in a box with a lever that ,if pressed by the mouse, the mouse gets food, the mouse will start pressing it more and more times because every time he did it was given a reward which reinforced that behavior. The visual stimulus - the lever - could be unfamiliar to the mouse but eventually the lever became a way for the mouse to acquire the reward. This process happens in a place in the brain called The Amygdala.

In that sense we are like that mouse, PMO is the lever and the feeling it spreads in our bodies afterward is the reward (though some of you might think you feel bad after PMO, your mind thinks otherwise. What you experience is an emotion and feelings and emotions are two psychologically different things).

He also showed that the best way to eliminate the conditioning is to present the visual stimulus - the lever - and do nothing after it is pressed by the mouse. If done several times the mouse will eventually stop pulling the lever.

The problem for us is that we cannot PMO (or just watch porn/masturbate) without getting the "good feeling" in the end so we have to completely abstain from it. This method also works, but it takes more time.

And here's the catch: apparently the mouse doesn't forget the conditioning (maybe in the very long run, but it hasn't been proven). An area if the frontal lobe (a part of the brain) called Ventro Medial pre-frontal Cortex at some point starts sending inhibiting signals to the Amygdala that cause the behavior to be held off. And that why it is so easy to relapse: at the slightest reminder of that "good feeling" the Amygdala kicks back into action and from there the way down is very short. That is why it is so important to completely abstain from porn, and because masturbation and porn is so strongly linked together that behavior must be eliminated to.

Hope this helps, feel free to correct me if you find anything wrong with what I wrote.

Cheers

*EDIT
The Amygdala by the way is one of the most involved parts of the brain with connections to as much as 92% of the brain. You can see how big of a part that brain area plays in our lives.