Pornography Works by Hijacking the Brain: Hijackers have always worked by slipping in innocently and then overpowering an unsuspecting airplane crew. That is what is happening all over this world online, as Satan uses the easily accessible media to addict multitudes.
We are fast becoming a pornographic society. Over the last decade, explicitly sexual images have crept into advertising, marketing, and virtually every niche of American life. This ambient pornography is now almost everywhere, from the local shopping mall to prime-time television.
To no one’s surprise, the vast majority of those who consume pornography are males. That is not a new development, as ancient forms of pornography attest. What is new is all about access. Today’s men and boys are not looking at line pictures drawn on cave walls. They have almost instant access to countless forms of pornography in a myriad of forms.
William M. Struthers of Wheaton College, a psychologist with a background in neuroscience and a teaching concentration in the biological bases of human behavior, explains, "Men seem to be wired in such a way that pornography hijacks the proper functioning of their brains and has a long-lasting effect on their thoughts and lives."
"The simplest explanation for why men view pornography (or solicit prostitutes) is that they are driven to seek out sexual intimacy," he explains. The urge for sexual intimacy is God-given and essential to the male, he acknowledges, but it is easily misdirected. Men are tempted to seek "a shortcut to sexual pleasure via pornography" and now find this shortcut easily accessed.
In a fallen world, pornography becomes an addictive poison. Struthers explains:
Viewing pornography is not an emotionally or physiologically neutral experience. It is fundamentally different from looking at black-and-white photos of the Lincoln Memorial or taking a color map of the provinces of Canada.
Men are reflexively drawn to the content of pornographic material. As such, pornography has wide-reaching effects to energize a man toward intimacy. It is not a neutral stimulus. It draws us in. Porn is a whispered promise. It promises more, better, and endless [pleasures].
Pornography "acts as a polydrug," Struthers explains. Boredom and curiosity lead many boys and men into experiences that become more like drug addiction than is often admitted.
Why men rather than women? As Struthers explains, the male and female brains are wired differently. Over time, exposure to pornography takes a man or boy deeper along "a one-way neurological superhighway where a man’s mental life is over-sexualized and narrowed. This superhighway has countless on-ramps but very few off-ramps.
Pornography is "visually magnetic" to the male brain. These experiences with pornography and pleasure hormones create new patterns in the brain’s wiring, and repeated experiences formalize the rewiring.
[1] Quoted from Albert Mohler, “Hijacking the Brain — How Pornography Works,” Al Mohler interviewed Dr. Struthers on the January 11, 2010 edition of The Albert Mohler Program. Listen here. [article used has 584 words]
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