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If you enjoy pornography (and many of us do; no judgment!) you'll be interested to know that your daily visits to RedTube or PornHub or to the VCR, if you are keeping it old school, may have some effect on your brain. This is exactly what our mothers warned us about!
Fortunately for all of us, masturbation won't make us go blind or cause us to sprout horrifying hairs on our palms — although I'm sure someone would open a salon for that so we'd be fine — but a small study conducted in Germany suggests that men (ladies, you're next) who watch pornography regularly were shown to have less volume in the part of the brain that is associated with reward and motivation. Simone Kühn, the head researcher, says that the correlation stops there, however. Even with MRI data, the researchers can't tell whether porn is harmful — I hope for everyone's sake it's not because 33 percent of American women and 70 percent of American men between the ages of 18 and 24 like a bit of video fantasy now and then — or whether the porn is what causes differences in the brain. Perhaps those people who already have lowered functioning in the rewards and motivation area are just drawn to pornography more than others.
So keep watching your freaky movies and do it quick before the studies get better and science ruins porn for all of us.
*Shakes fist angrily at science.*
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Image credit: Getty
