When we watch porn clips, the brain seems
to shunt blood, therefore energy, elsewhere.
It goes to regions of the brain responsible
for sexual arousal or genital engorgement.
Porn On The Brain from Dawson CinCom on Vimeo.
Relax When You Want to Come
Watching porn would seem to be a vision-intensive task. But looking at explicit clips can actually quiet the part of the brain that processes visual stimuli.
Most of the time, watching movies or conducting any other visual task sends extra blood flow to this brain region. Not so when the movies are sex-intensive.
Instead, the brain seems to shunt blood, therefore energy, elsewhere, perhaps to regions of the brain responsible for sexual arousal.
It turns out that the brain may not need to take in all the visual details of a sex scene.
If you look at your computer and you have to write something or whatever, then you have to look specifically and carefully at what you’re doing because if you don’t, it means you make mistakes.
But the moment you are watching explicit sex movies, that’s not necessary, because you know exactly what’s going on. It’s not important if the door is green or yellow.
Anxiety & Arousal
The brain can either be anxious or aroused (or neither), but not both. During orgasm, he has found, activity in brain regions associated with anxiety plummets.
This phenomenon may explain why women with low levels of sexual desire often have high levels of anxiety. It makes sense. If you’re looking around, focusing on visual details, scanning for danger, it may not be so easy to focus on arousal.
If you yourself are in a very dangerous situation, whatever the reason, you don’t have sexual feelings, because you have to survive for yourself, not survive for the species.
The results suggest that the brain is focusing on sexual arousal as more important than visual processing during the x-rated films.
The brain needs to spare as much energy as possible, so if some part of it isn’t necessary at a high level of functioning, it immediately goes down.
The mechanisms by which anxiety impacts sexual arousal in women are not firmly established. Clearly, anxiety proneness may predispose women to developing worries and fears about their sexual lives and sexual behavior.
Sex-related anxiety can make it difficult to psychologically engage in sexual activity, as the woman may be too preoccupied with her sex-related fears to fully attend to sexually arousing stimuli.
It’s also possible that, in the absence of specific sexual concerns, high levels of anxiety may be associated with non-sexual cognitive distractions such as worry, obsessions, and hyper-vigilance to bodily sensations. These can interfere with sexual responsiveness.
Even among women without sexual disorders, laboratory studies have demonstrated that non-sexual cognitive distractions reduce both physiological and subjective arousal to erotic stimuli.
Finally, because both acute anxiety and sexual arousal are mediated by changes in autonomic arousal, there may be a physiological basis to impaired sexual responding secondary to anxiety.
Although clinical reports generally link anxiety to impaired sexual arousal, laboratory studies suggest that, under certain conditions, anxiety may facilitate genital sexual arousal responses.
For example, anxiety induced by an anxiety-evoking film enhanced vaginal vasocongestive responses to erotic stimuli in the laboratory. In other words, evocations of fear can be a sexual turn-on.
But generally, the findings have implications for sexual dysfunction. They paint a picture of the brain in which safety is paramount and anxiety is a libido-killer.
If a man wants to have sex, he needs to create a safe situation for the woman.
