Nowadays, I get a lot of questions about pornography. And the discussion around pornography is always related to the discussion around masturbation. But let's just talk about pornography for a moment in this context of these primitive drives and these circuits within the hypothalamus, which we were all born with, that clearly some of them are devoted to our progression as a species through reproduction, zero question about that.

Sexual behavior being linked to reproduction, not always, but certainly we can all agree on that. It's a necessary precondition. I hope we can still all agree on that. But last time I checked, that's still true. A sperm and an egg met someplace in some context to create all of us.

Okay. We're still grounded in that. Pornography is something that I hear quite a lot from typically young males, but sometimes young females or even older females who say that they can see themselves trying to resist the desire to go look at it. And it almost doesn't feel like a desire anymore.

They're sort of just in a compulsion that is almost unconscious, but they're just aware of the fact that they're- Like an eating disorder. Like an eating disorder. They're doing it. They're just doing it and they can't help themselves. And we could think about two ways to attack this if one believes it's a real concern, and they certainly do.

So I do. I don't, I would be open if I had or do. Pornography has not been my thing and I don't struggle with it. But when I hear from these people, it's so clear that they're asking, is it the prevalence of pornography out there or is it something really broken in them?

Like are they broken? And I don't know that I would say after having the discussion we've had thus far, that they're broken. It seems to me that it's like, as you said, it's the manifestation of one part of their, it's one personality within them. Well, and it's been compulsively rewarded.

So when you see yourself moving towards the culmination of a desired goal, a dopamine, that's accompanied by dopamine release, okay? And so two things, you know this, but everybody who's listening might not. There's two elements to that dopamine release. One is pleasure, but the other is that the dopamine, imagine that there are circuits activated as you're acting.

What the dopamine does is increase the probability that the circuits were, that were activated just before the positive experience happened, grow. Okay, so now if you're engaged with pornography and that culminates in successful sexual satiation, which it can, that's what masturbation does, then the whole personality that's oriented toward that set of stimuli is going to come to dominate.

It's very much like an addiction, except it's, you know, there has been, there's been work done with generally simpler animals on these phenomena called super stimuli. I think it's stickleback fish where this was first observed. So males, I hope I get this right, but I've got it approximately right.

I believe it's male sticklebacks will, they're very aggressive towards other male sticklebacks. And the reason they're aggressive is because the other male sticklebacks have a red dot on their bellies, so they don't like red dots at all. And so you could really enrage a stickleback with a red dot.

And if you use a red dot that's a little bigger and a little brighter than the typical red dot, you get a super stimulus. It's virtually irresistible to the stickleback. And it's weird because the maximal activation is produced by a stimulus that they wouldn't see in nature. It slightly exceeds, that's exactly what pornography does, it's a super stimulus, right?

And it's not surprising that young males in particular are susceptible to that because male sexuality in human beings is very visually oriented, very. And a lot of our brain is visual, way more than virtually every other animal, certainly every other primate and every other mammal. And so we have a situation where any 13-year-old boy can see more hyper-attractive super stimulus women in one day than the most successful man who ever lived 100 years ago would have ever seen in his whole life.

Yeah, well that's like an evolutionary, ecological, radical ecological transformation. And it's worse because it's easily accessible so it takes no work, right? So not only is it a super stimulus, it's one that's at hand so to speak. And the analog in the food world would be highly palatable, highly processed food.

Yeah, sugar, fat combination. The other day I went into a gas station to use the restroom because I was traveling home for Thanksgiving and I looked around and I thought, this isn't a convenience store, this is a pharmacy. Anything that had chocolate also seemed to have caffeine and color, everything, every drink seemed to combine not just sugar but also caffeine and some other things that would provide stimulants.

Then you've got nicotine. Energy drinks. And these things on their own aren't necessarily bad, any one of these one elements in low enough doses, in frequent use, et cetera. But maybe sugar being the one that clearly I think deserves deeper investigation, right? But it just occurred to me that- That's different than the difference between manufacturing sugar and manufacturing cocaine.

I mean, you take something that's available in its natural form in relatively low concentrations and purify it. I mean, coca leaves, the natives used coca leaves forever as mild stimulant, didn't seem to cause them any trouble. But that's way different than cocaine, right? And sugar has the same, arguably, the same pathological properties.

Well, I didn't think we were going to go here, but I think it's extremely appropriate and important that we do. So I know that you followed what is essentially an elimination diet for a number of years. You eat meat, right? I eat meat, vegetables, fruit, and some starches, unrefined starches, in any event.

One thing that I think is absolutely clear from following a clean diet, so to speak, of any kind, but let's say of the sort that you follow or I follow, is that you very soon learn the relationship between taste of the food, volume of the food, macronutrient, so protein, fat, or carbohydrate content, micronutrients, and satiation.

Which is, if you think about it, it's sort of like a big plate of broccoli or a big steak or something, the brain learns and the hypothalamus learns the association between the taste, the caloric content, what else is in there, and satiation. If you think about highly processed food or even combinations of multiple ingredients, it's absolutely impossible to do.

The brain can't parse what are the various things in here and how do they relate to my feelings of satisfaction. It's the difference between a super drug and what I believe are the elements that were, that we have- - Explain why you think that link about satiation can't be learned in the case of these processed foods.

- Yeah, because in the context of these processed foods, they're activating multiple neuron systems in the hypothalamus and gut. We know that the gut has neurons that can respond to sugar, fatty acids, and amino acid content. And there's this prominent theory that one of the main reasons we eat is to forage for amino acids, that we'll eat until we get enough of the essential amino acids.

- For sure. - And we correlate that with taste, but that the gut has neurons, we know the gut has neurons that signal through the vagus, up through a little relay called the no-dose ganglion, if you wanna look at it, fun name, and then up to the dopaminergic centers of the brain, which make us, oh, when we eat something that has a high essential amino acid content, like a steak, like a really tasty steak, the neurons in the gut in a way that is independent of taste are signaling to the brain, ah, I'm getting essential amino acids, you should eat more of this thing.

If those, let's just say a small fraction of those amino acids that are present in a candy bar or in a, you know, a package of Skittles, which I'm guessing there's very few of them, if any, you're gonna continue to forage for food because those neurons will also respond to sugar, basically, it will keep you eating until you get enough of those amino acids.

In other words, there are two parallel tracks, one within our taste system. - Multiple pathways to satiation. - Right, totally, right, multiple pathways to satiation, one dependent on taste, one dependent on actual nutrient content. The mouth can only learn taste association, the mouth can't actually learn nutrient content, the gut knows nutrient content, the problem is you take a food that is low in a micronutrient or macronutrient or essential amino acids or essential fatty acids, after all, there are no essential carbohydrates, there are only essential amino acids and essential fatty acids.

- Right, right, right. - And it will keep you eating and it will keep the appetite system revving until you get enough of those. Now, here's the issue, if you've ever done this, it's probably been-- - So that's empty calories. - Empty calories. - Yeah, oh yeah. - But what's, so in some ways, you know, this again is an analog to the whole discussion around pornography, masturbation and reproduction, right?

I'm not saying that reproduction is the be all, end all of sexual activity, but in the evolutionary sense, it absolutely is, right? There's no question about that, there's no moral judgment there, that's just the reality. So the situation with food is the following, if we are eating without any gut level understanding of what's coming in, we will keep eating.

If you, let me give an example, you probably haven't done this experiment in a while, but if you've ever just had, you know, ribeye steak or two, it's pretty satiating. Maybe you also have a salad if you're me or some broccoli or something like that. If one takes, then even after you've eaten all that, one bite of pasta, one bite of pasta, the next impulse is more, right?

Even though you already have enough essential amino acids from those steaks, you're loosing, you know, threshold, you've reached that, et cetera, all of that good stuff, why? Because blood glucose goes up and then you desire more because blood glucose elevations are linked directly to the dopaminergic system. So what I'm basically trying to say here is that I do think that there are elements to our food, modern food, if you will.

It seems like it's, you know, anything but modern in the sense that it's worse for us than the more primitive foods, but highly processed foods, pornography, any drug that spikes dopamine dramatically, like methamphetamine, for instance, any behavior that spikes dopamine dramatically that very quickly hijacks these circuits. And to me, the way to teach those circuits a calmer, more prudent version of themselves, right, to enter a different hypothalamic activation pattern, is to start breaking the things down into their essential elements, right?

About the motivation, the pleasure, et cetera, to tamp all that down. I mean, we know that for pornography, if the pornography is very extreme, then less extreme pornography doesn't seem to work. - Well, that's 'cause there's also a novelty kick in dopaminergic striving, right? So, with any basic appetitive pleasure, there's a dopaminergic kick, but with any novelty, there's also a dopaminergic kick.

So there's an optimized threshold for novelty in appetitive striving that plays out in pornography. So there's the direct effect of the stimulus as such, but there's variation in the stimulus that's also novel, and so it's a common pattern for pornographic usage to become more, what would you say, fetishistic.

That's one way of thinking about it as it progresses, because that keeps the novelty alive. That's very dangerous, that's a very dangerous development. - Right, and I would venture in a very different domain, that if you were to eat your steak slathered in barbecue sauce for a couple of weeks, going back to the way that you eat them now, which by the way, this is a great opportunity to educate people about something that you taught me when we had dinner last, which is that if you're gonna order a steak, order a Pittsburgh char.

The char on the outside is incredibly tasty. We love that, the umami taste, I wish you have a devoted taste receptor for that. - It's complex. - Yeah, and if they don't know what a Pittsburgh char is, then maybe you're in the wrong restaurant or you need to educate them, but incredibly satiating, delicious, right?

But if you were to slather those steaks in a bunch of things, I would suspect that after a while, your plain steaks wouldn't taste as good. But the way to make them taste good again would be to eat them plain for a period of time in which the stuff that all the condiments, et cetera, would start to become aversive.

I do believe that when we return to the sort of most naturally satisfying mode of engaging with these circuits, here we're talking about food and sex in parallel, that they become especially satiating. And I think that, you know, in hearing from all these people that are addicted to pornography, and they're not addicted like it's telling me they love it and they can't stop.

They're telling me it's no longer working for them, that there's this, you know, diminishment in the amount of dopamine that they're getting over time, and they feel trapped within it, and they have no sense whatsoever because they haven't been socialized to go out and find a real relationship, a real sexual relationship or a relationship of any kind.

- Well, it's also, there is some evidence suggesting too that if you've been socialized into pornography sexuality, it's actually quite difficult to establish a sexual relationship with an actual partner. Now, I would say to some degree that's always been difficult because it's a complex form of behavior, but the introduction of pornography, well, it sets up a whole landscape of expectation, for example, that's not necessarily going to play out that well in the real world, let's say.

- And there's also a learning of those biological systems in the brain to evoke arousal by observing sex as opposed to participating, completely different. So some of these- - Right, that's voyeur, right? You're basically learning to be a voyeur, right, right. - And so you think about young brains that are highly plastic, learning that.

So the returning- - Yeah, we have no idea what to make of that because, especially for young men, because when they hit puberty, sexuality becomes a very insistent force, and we have no idea what effect pornography has on the development of male sexuality, none. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)