Porn is a big business. Every year, Americans spend $4 billion on video pornography, which makes the industry larger than the N.F.L., the N.B.A. or Major League Baseball. When you include Internet Web sites, porn networks and pay-per-view movies on cable and satellite, phone sex, and magazines, the porn business is estimated to total between $10 billion and $14 billion annually. As Frank Rich notes, "People spend more money for pornography in America in a year than they do on movie tickets, more than they do on all the performing arts combined." Sex sites are estimated to account for up to forty percent of all Internet traffic.
But how does porn work? Why do humans (especially men) get so excited by seeing someone else have sex? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: watching porn triggers an idea (we start thinking about sex), which then triggers a change in our behavior (we become sexually aroused). This is how most of us think about thinking: sensations cause thoughts which cause physical responses. Porn is a quintessential example of how such a thought process might work.
But this straightforward answer is entirely wrong. Porn does not cause us to think about sex. Rather, porn causes to think we are having sex. From the perspective of the brain, the act of arousal is not preceded by a separate idea, which we absorb via the television screen. The act itself is the idea. In other words, porn works by convincing us that we are not watching porn. We think we are inside the screen, doing the deed.
New evidence of this porn anatomy has just emerged. In the new Neuroimage, a lab in Germany flashed images of aroused genitalia to both men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals. As expected, brain activity correlated with sexual preference: the minds of homosexual men mirrored the minds of heterosexual women, and vice-versa. But what was really interesting was the pattern of activation itself. When subjects looked at porn in the fMRI machine (not a very erotic place), "the ventral premotor cortex which is a key structure for imitative (mirror neurons) and tool-related (canonical neurons) actions showed a bilateral sexual preference-specific activation, suggesting that viewing sexually aroused genitals of the preferred sex triggers action representations of sexual behavior." In other words, looking at still pictures of naked people triggered our mirror neurons into action, as the brain began pretending that it was actually having sex, and not just looking at smutty pictures in a science lab.
Comments (24)
I'm skeptical that the brain thinks it is having sex while looking at pictures. Perhaps preparing to have sex is a better wording.
I know when I see a picture of a nude woman I do not think I am having sex but may think about the possibilty:-)
Then reality catches up.
Posted by: Uber | September 20, 2006 1:13 PM