Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles Part 2: The Coolidge Effect Here's another reason internet porn is so stimulating and so addictive. It takes advantage of an old program located in your primitive brain. This subconscious program is what got you started down the path of using porn. Consider this experiment. It's been done many times. I guess scientists have nothing better to do. What happens when you drop a male rat into a cage with a receptive female? Well, first you see a frenzy of copulation. Progressively, the male tires of female #1. She wants more but he's had enough. He just can't get excited anymore. So, what do you do? Well, replace the original female with a fresh one. And the male revives and gallantly struggles to fertilize her. He keeps on going then the same things happen. The male loses interest in female #2. Starting to see a pattern here? This process can be repeated again and again but with novel partners. Now, I'm not sure how many times this can be repeated. But this can be repeated until the male nearly dies of exhaustion. See, this is a genetic program. This has nothing to do with your genitals. It's all happening in the brain. And the purpose of it is to make more babies but even more importantly, is to increase the genetic variety of the male's off spring. Here's an interesting graph, which happens to be about rams. As we can see, we have female presentation at the bottom, we have time to ejaculation in minutes on the left side and we have a male. In one experiment, the male had the same female over and over again and in another experiment he had different females. How long did it take him to ejaculate? Well, if you look at the same female, he got longer and longer until finally I guess when they stopped the experiment. It took 18 minutes. Now, a ram only lives 12 years so 18 minutes is like 2 hours in our time. So it's quite a bit of time. And of course with different females, he ejaculated quite quickly which of course means he was very very excited. If you think about heavy porn users, they often need more novelty just like these animals, to get excited. Here's what's going on with the animals. It's called the Coolidge effect. It starts out with declining interest in the present sexual partner then renewed vigor in a novel sexual partner. This is present in all mammals, and it 's also present in females and of course, we said it's here for the genetic variety of the off spring. This is what started you down the road to getting hooked on porn. You see, with porn, you're like a lab rat. Your primitive brain urges you to fertilize the two-dimensional females or whatever is on your screen. So, you're happily married and partnered up, you'd say, “No, I'm never going to cheat!” Well, either way, the Coolidge effect is still at work in your brain. The more rational parts of your brain are saying, “No, I'm not going to cheat!”, but the primitive parts of your brain are saying, “Wow, look at that!” or maybe fantasizing what would it be like to have sex or maybe you're using porn. This is a subtle reminder of the deep programming of your brain, the Coolidge effect, that's there to spread your gene far and wide. Speaking of looking, maybe we're not so unique. Here's an interesting research. The headline is “Monkeys Pay to See Female Monkey Bottoms”. What are they paying with? Well, monkeys love sweets like fruit juice. So, in a study, the male monkeys would give up their fruit juice in order to look at female bottoms. You know, this is a little bit like porn, or maybe a lot like porn, monkey porn. Here's the limbic system, the primitive brain where the old program is installed is often called the limbic system or mammal brain. It's the part of the brain we have in common with all mammals, including that monkey we just saw. It's true we have only a single brain, but certain parts have specific jobs. This part is ancient, hundred million years old or older and its job is all about survival. Now, I could spend an hour talking about all of its functions, but what's important to us is that it governs emotions, such as fear, joy, anger, etc. And importantly, it is also the seat of most of our desires and our drives, including hunger, mate selection and our sexual urges. You see, sexual desire or libido is not in your genitals. It's here, this is where you experience the Coolidge effect and where all addictions happen, including porn addiction.
B1 US porn coolidge male brain female primitive Part 2: The Coolidge Effect | Your Brain on Porn | Animated Series 12 1 joey joey posted on 2021/04/25 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary