The second looked at patterns of brain activation when the men viewed sexual or neutral images. The first scan was a simple structural brain scan. So if they had shrunken brains (we'll come onto that later), it wasn't causing them any major problems. In fact, all the men who participated were free from any psychiatric or neurological disorders. They scanned the brains of 64 healthy men (average age 29) in three ways.
The study that triggered all this concern was published by a German pair: Simone Kühn, a psychologist, and Jürgen Gallinat, a psychiatrist. The claim arrives courtesy of a brain imaging paper published last month in JAMA Psychiatry, a respected medical journal.Īmong the global hyperbolic headlines that followed, my favourite was from a German site: ' Pea brain: watching porn online will wear out your brain and make it shrivel.' Others included ' Viewing porn shrinks the brain' (from the reliably untrustworthy Daily Mail) and Watching Porn Linked To Less Gray Matter In The Brain (from Huffington Post). Today, we're told that watching moderate amounts of pornography will shrink your brain. A hundred years ago they said that masturbating would make you go blind.
