Sexual brain training matters—especially during adolescence.

Editor’s Note: The comments quoted throughout this piece were taken from the comments sections of posts and message board conversations where men were talking about sex.

It’s normal for kids to want to learn all about sex, especially during puberty and adolescence when reproduction becomes the brain’s top priority. For this we can thank the specifics of teen-brain development.

Think of an adolescent jungle primate watching another band with such fascination that he (or she, in some species) leaves his companions, and endures the slings and arrows of being without allies at the bottom of another troup’s pecking order—all for a chance to get it on with exotic hotties in the future. The things our genes do to guarantee genetic diversity!

Now, fast-forward to a young guy discovering the mind-boggling novelty of Internet erotica:

I started looking at Internet porn when I was 11. I immediately became hooked, and spent hours daily viewing porn. Simply seeing a pair of exposed breasts was enough to get me off. But desensitization soon kicked in, and I began developing fetishes to get the same hit from porn. It started out with different ethnicities, then lesbians, then watersports, then scat/beastiality/BDSM/tranny, and then any combination of the above to create the sickest porn imaginable. I can remember sitting in school fantasizing about sick porn that I could search for that night.

What is it about the adolescent brain that makes this guy’s experience not unusual? Answer: During adolescence a temporary neurological imbalance develops. The “sex, drugs and rock & roll” part of the brain is in overdrive. The “let’s give this some thought” part is still under construction, and won’t reach maturity until adulthood.

This recipe for impulsive and risky behavior rearranges other adolescent-mammal brains too. It is evolution’s way of driving the brash independence many young mammals need as they seek mates and carve out territories. In the brain’s cost-benefit analysis, the scale is tipping heavily in the direction of possible rewards.

There’s a kicker though. The capacity of our teen to wire up new sexual associations mushrooms around 11 or 12 when billions of new neural connections (synapses) create endless possibilities. However, by adulthood, his brain must prune his neural circuitry to leave him with a manageable assortment of choices. By his twenties, he may not exactly be stuck with the sexual proclivities he falls into during adolescence, but they can be like deep ruts in his brain—not easy to ignore or reconfigure.

Sexual-cue exposure matters more during adolescence than at any other time in life. Now, add to this incendiary reality the lighter fluid of today’s off-the-wall erotica available at the tap of a finger. Is it any surprise that some teens wire semi-permanently to constant cyber novelty instead of potential mates? Or wire their sexual responsiveness to things that are unrelated to their sexual orientation? Or manage to desensitize their brains—and spiral into porn addiction?

Incidentally, are you a guy remembering your own adolescence—and how you could never climax enough during those years? Perhaps you’re supposing that Internet porn would have been a splendid innovation. If so, read these two articles: Porn, Novelty and the Coolidge Effect‏ and Porn Then and Now: Welcome to Brain Training. Porn, its content, the way it’s delivered, and its potential effects on the brain have changed radically. For today’s users, more orgasm can lead to less satisfaction.

Teen brains differ from adult brains

When we dug into the brain research on adolescents, we were astonished at how malleable teen brains are. Radical changes in the sexual environment hit them hardest. Here are four vulnerabilities unique to teen brains:

1. Much stronger “Go get it!” signals

The reward circuitry is the core of all drives (including libido), emotions, likes, dislikes, motivation…and addiction. In adolescence, sex hormones propel this ancient circuitry into a window of hyperactivity, which subsides by the early twenties. As journalist David Dobbs explains:

We all like new and exciting things, but we never value them more highly than we do during adolescence. Here we hit a high in what behavioral scientists call sensation seeking: the hunt for the neural buzz, the jolt of the unusual or unexpected. … This love of the thrill peaks at around age 15.

The brain’s sensitivity to dopamine, the “Gotta get it!” neurochemical crests, which spurs novelty seeking, overrides executive control, and helps consolidate learning and habits. In fact, teen brains respond to anything perceived as exciting with two-to-four times the reward-circuitry activation of adults, thanks to their extra dopamine sensitivity. Both novelty and searching/seeking spike dopamine in all human brains, but cyber erotica’s endless possibilities prove an irresistible lure for many teens.

The first time I looked at those hot pictures the feeling seemed to be out of this world, just ineffable. Suddenly I knew there was something worth living for, everything else was just boring, everyday life. I fled to this artificial drug: porn and masturbation. It was not unusual to watch porn for hours a day.

“Ineffable?” Yes. Teens are more likely to register sexual arousal, and other highs, as transcendental, memorable experiences. That is why you can still recall the shimmering details of that first centerfold. But there’s more evidence of hypersensitivity to thrills:

Alas, their heightened sensitivity to reward automatically renders teens more susceptible to addiction than if they encountered the same thrills later in life.

2. Decreased sensitivity to aversion

Having spent Friday night playing “World of Warcraft” until 4AM, while washing down eight slices of pizza and a bag of Doritos with a six-pack of Mountain Dew, our hero is ready to do it all again come Saturday night. Research shows that teens are less deterred by symptoms of excess. Aversion is a reward-circuitry function, and teens can handle more wattage before their circuits overload

Ever wonder why Slasher + Teens (sex) = Summer Box-Office Hit? It all comes down to the marvels of the brain. No wonder porn images that adults find shocking, “eeeew,” or violent, register as abnormally exciting to teens. Also keep in mind that teens are less able to take other people’s feelings into account (even bad actors).

When I was 14/15, I encountered she-male porn while surfing the Internet. I still remember the graphic nature of the advert. Something just snapped in my pubescent brain. All the straight and lesbian porn I had watched for several years seemed ordinary. My heart started racing. My head was thumping, and the fear of getting caught…not just watching porn, but watching what some could consider not exactly 100% straight porn…made it all the more memorable. I remember crying after I finished. I didn’t know what came over me. I was so terrified I wanted to curl up into a ball in my bedroom. But I didn’t stop watching it. I was still attracted to girls, but with the she-male porn, I could orgasm quicker.

3. Weaker “Stop!” signals

The sex hormones that initiate teen sensitivity to thrills unfortunately do nothing to speed up development of their brain’s self-control center. A teen brain is like a new car with a Ferrari engine and Ford Pinto brakes.

At puberty, an extremely reactive “accelerator” comes online: the brain’s emotion-motivation mechanism, or reward circuitry, located below the rational cortex. It overpowers the “brakes,” the brain’s “CEO” or prefrontal cortex in the forehead, which won’t fully mature for a decade. The latter assesses risk, thinks ahead, chooses priorities, allocates attention and controls impulses.

Meanwhile, teens often base their choices on their emotional impulses as opposed to reasoning or planning. Later, as the prefrontal cortex matures, there will be fewer “I can’t believe he did that” moments. Teens make sounder judgments and modulate mood, plan and remember more effectively.

In the meantime, teens have trouble perceiving the consequences of “going for it.” Again, this is no accident. Daredevil tendencies during adolescence serve species that must take risks then to strike out on their own or find mates. In the case of adolescent humans, evolution has simply not had time to adapt to the hazards of recreational drugs, fast cars, or excessive consumption of junk food, online gaming, or Internet porn. That’s why we have the Darwin Awards.

4. Extreme neuronal growth followed by pruning

Human brains go through two stages of dramatic neuronal growth: one in utero and throughout the first several months of life, the other between the ages of 10 and 13—just when most boys (and now, many girls) begin to look at Internet porn. Ideally, during this critical developmental period, we humans are exposed to age-appropriate sexual behavior. We learn how to flirt and connect with potential partners.

This second burst of neuronal activity entails first multiplication and then subtraction of neural connections. No wonder mood swings are a hallmark of adolescence! Together, genes and environment sculpt the clay of a teen’s frontal cortex. As use-it-or-lose-it proceeds, the brain reorganizes and fine-tunes itself:

The cortex prunes away little used circuits, while strengthening well worn neural pathways. Nerve cell axons in favored pathways become better insulated with myelin, increasing the speed of nerve impulses. Little branches that receive messages (called dendrites) grow like vines to better hear the incoming signal. The connections between axons and dendrite (synapses) multiply on strong circuits and vanish on weaker ones. In the end you have memories, skills, habits, preferences and ways of coping that stand the test of time. (ibid., Dobbs, emphasis added)

In less glowing terms, we restrict our options—without realizing how critical our choices were during our final, pubescent, neuronal growth spurt. According to researcher Jay Giedd:

If a teen is doing music or sports or academics, those are the cells and connections that will be hardwired. If they’re lying on the couch or playing video games or MTV [or Internet porn], those are the cells and connections that are going to survive.

This is one reason why polls asking teens how Internet porn use is affecting them are unlikely to reveal the extent of porn’s effects. Kids who have never masturbated without porn have no idea how it is affecting them. (It’s like asking them, “How has being male affected you?”) They have nothing to compare with.

Keep in mind that older porn users often do not connect their porn-related symptoms with heavy porn use—even when they develop porn-induced sexual dysfunction (PISD). Porn always seems like the “cure,” because even if they can’t get it up for sex, they can usually get it up if they watch enough extreme porn. Can we expect teens to figure it out?

Same problem with asking teens about porn’s effects on mood. Users always “feel better” when using, even if the more they use, the worse they feel overall. So why would porn be seen as the problem? Moreover, when users try to quit, they sometimes face weeks of severe withdrawal symptoms, so controlling use can be mistaken for the problem instead of the solution.

Fact is, most heavy users who are going to hit a wall from excess, don’t do so until their twenties—just about the time their reward circuitry has curtailed its hypersensitivity. For example, by adulthood, dopamine receptors in the reward circuitry gradually decrease by a third or a half. Now, thrills aren’t as thrilling, and the consequences of excess are more disconcerting. Once nature’s foot is off the reward accelerator, it’s time for a hunter-gatherer to settle down and raise some youngins.

No birds or bees, just pixels please

Meanwhile, the adolescent brain is ripe for a perfect storm as the genetically driven hunt for novelty and the unexpected collides with the endless erotica of the Internet. Hypnotic Web-surfing—requiring no effort but scrolling and fapping—replaces leaving one’s tribe to search the savannah for fertile mates.

When I was 18, I had sex for the first time. When she said she was “down all the way”, I ran to the nearest store to pick up condoms like I had the Reaper chasing me. After the deed, my thoughts were, “Hmm…it didn’t feel that much different from masturbation, and it required a hell of a lot more work! Meh, I’ll stick to porn and not bother with a girlfriend.”

Another guy responded:

My thoughts EXACTLY. Just back pain, muscle strain, breathlessness, sweatiness and performance anxiety. MUCH less stress to just crack one off, plus you got your own ‘Iron Fist’ that gets you off better than that real vagina. Not only that, you always get a ‘good visual’ with a ‘porn girlfriend.’ You can see all those beautiful body contours in perfect lighting, breasts n’ butts n’ thighs look glorious, and *always* visible. In real life that’s rarely the case. The first time I did it, I didn’t truly enjoy it (even though we both came a lot). My first time should’ve felt like a TRIUMPH, given how ‘successful’ it was, but it felt artificial. It was then I KNEW there was perhaps something a tad wrong. The sex in my *mind* always seemed sexy and enjoyable. The *real* sex I had was primarily industrial and unexciting. Not good.

Today’s teens sometimes wire their arousal to Internet porn’s unnaturally intense, synthetic stimuli for as long as a decade before they try to connect with real partners. (See pages of self-reports of adolescent porn use.) The situation is even more precarious if a teen’s innocent pursuit of jollies has led to more fundamental brain changes, i.e., addiction. Again, teens are more susceptible to addiction than adults, due to their hyperactive reward circuitry and immature executive control.

[ 1 | 2 ]

Pages: 1 2