PORNOGRAPHY

I am currently reading a book called "The Brain that Changes Itself" by Norman Doidge. This book talks about the recent discoveries regarding the brain and how it functions. In the old days, the assumption was that the brain did not change after it childhood. Any brain damage was permanent. Recent discoveries shows that, on the contrary, the brain can and does re-organize itself. The book describes the experiences of various people who suffered personal tragedies - such as brain damage - and how they have been able to overcome their tragedies by exploiting the brain's ability to re-organize itself. One of the most interesting chapters concerns the damage of watching pornography on the Internet. To understand the paragraph below (which I took from the book), you simply need to know that "neuroplasticity" refers to the brain's ability to re-organize itself.

"During the 1990s, when the Internet was growing quickly and pornography was exploding, I treated a number of men who had acquired a taste of a kind of pornography that troubled and disgusted them. These were normal men that simply started watching pornography on the Internet. They soon became addicted. This addiction not only meant that they were spending more time watching pornography on the internet - 5 hours a day was normal - but the sites they watched became more and more obscene. They started with 'normal pornography' and then progressed to 'abnormal pornography'. An addict experiences desires because his plastic brain has become sensitive to the experience. Putting it another way, the brain re-organized itself first around pornography and then when that was not enough, it reorganized itself around abnormal pornography" (pp. 102 to 110 - I edited the quote to make it shorter and easier to understand).

The moral of the story - don't watch pornography on-line. Apart from the Islamic consideration, if you do watch pornography, you run the risk of becoming addicted and the brain re-organizing itself in such a way that you cannot have a normal relationship anymore.