The Truth About Pornography | Dr. Jordan Peterson & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Summary

In this discussion, Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. Andrew Huberman delve into the psychology and neuroscience behind pornography addiction. They explore how pornography acts as a super stimulus, akin to how processed foods hyper-activate taste senses. Both experts compare the dopaminergic effects of consuming visually stimulating content and artificially flavored foods to natural drives, emphasizing the evolutionary implications. They speak about the challenges faced by individuals, especially young males, in resisting these hyper-stimuli and how it impacts their ability to form real-world relationships and satisfy natural desires. By drawing parallels to addictive behaviors and processed food consumption, they highlight the complexities of modern stimuli on primitive human drives.

Highlights

• Dr. Peterson and Dr. Huberman emphasize that pornography acts as a super stimulus similar to processed foods, highlighting its hyper-activating dopaminergic effect 📈.
• Huberman compares the effect of pornography on the brain to the surge in dopamine from processed foods, stressing the evolutionary mismatch 🧬.
• They discuss how young males are exposed to more virtual stimuli today than previous generations experienced live, impacting development 📱.
• The conversation explores the addictive qualities of both modern foods and pornography, drawing parallels in how they disrupt natural satisfaction mechanisms 🚦.
• They propose that educational efforts focusing on natural gratification can mitigate the adverse effects of overexposure to these super stimuli 🎓.

Key Takeaways

• Pornography is a super stimulus similar to highly processed foods, triggering primal dopamine responses 🚀.
• Young brains are particularly susceptible to pornography's exaggerated stimuli due to their visual and cognitive plasticity 🧠.
• Modern accessibility to hyper-stimulating content is a significant departure from natural evolutionary environments 🌍.
• There is a parallel between junk food consumption and pornography in how they both lead to a lack of true satiation 🍔.
• Educating on simple dietary and behavioral shifts can help recalibrate natural satisfaction cycles 🔄.

Overview

Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. Andrew Huberman dive into the intricate relationship between modern stimuli like pornography and processed foods and our primal drives. They liken pornography to a 'super stimulus,' much like junk food, which hyperactivates the brain's reward systems, particularly through the release of dopamine. The conversation highlights how such stimuli, both easily accessible and highly appealing, can create addictive behavioral patterns, especially among young individuals.

The duo discusses the striking changes in environmental stimuli over evolutionary timescales, pointing out how today's young males can access more visual novelty and arousal triggers in a day than many would have experienced in a lifetime 100 years ago. This abundance of stimuli leads to issues such as pornography addiction, where the stimuli are not just more frequent but also exaggerated compared to anything found in nature, making them hard to resist and potentially damaging to real-world relational dynamics.

By establishing parallels between processed food consumption and pornography use, the discussion underscores the importance of returning to more natural forms of satisfaction and behavioral regulation. They argue that understanding the effects of these super stimuli is crucial in developing strategies for healthier lifestyle choices. Encouraging natural dietary habits and fostering real-world social connections are presented as potential solutions to counteract the negative impacts of these modern-day hyper-stimuli.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Pornography and its Link to Primitive Drives The chapter introduces the topic of pornography and its connection to primitive drives, focusing on how these drives are linked to circuits within the hypothalamus that are essential for the species' progression through reproduction. While discussing pornography, it highlights its frequent association with masturbation discussions.
• 00:30 - 02:00: Dopamine, Pleasure, and Compulsion in Pornography Use The chapter discusses the link between sexual behavior and reproduction, acknowledging it as a necessary precondition for the latter. It further explores how pornography is a prevalent topic, especially among young males but also among some females. The focus is on understanding the underlying mechanics of human interaction with pornography, especially the role of dopamine in pleasure and compulsion.
• 02:00 - 04:00: Super Stimuli and Pornography The chapter explores the concept of super stimuli focusing on the context of pornography. It discusses how individuals experience an overwhelming compulsion to view pornography, comparing this behavior to eating disorders. The chapter suggests that people may feel they are acting unconsciously and despite awareness that they should not engage in this behavior, they find themselves unable to resist it. The text proposes that if one acknowledges this as a real concern, there are two possible approaches to addressing it, although the specific strategies are not detailed in the provided excerpt.
• 04:00 - 06:00: Analogs in Food: Super Stimuli and Processed Foods The chapter explores the concept of analogs in food, specifically super stimuli and processed foods. It poses questions about whether the prevalence of processed foods creates issues within individuals or if there is an inherent flaw in them. The discussion leans towards the idea that the appeal of such foods could be a manifestation of a certain aspect of an individual's personality, rather than an indication of something being fundamentally wrong with them.
• 06:00 - 08:00: The Role of Amino Acids and Nutrients in Eating Behavior This chapter examines the connection between amino acids, nutrients, and eating behavior, highlighting the role of dopamine in goal pursuit and reward. Dopamine not only contributes to the sensation of pleasure but also plays a key role in the activation of neural circuits responsible for achieving desired goals. This neurotransmitter encourages the continuation of activities that lead to rewards, illustrating its dual function in pleasure and motivation.
• 08:00 - 10:30: Addiction to Pornography and Food: Dopamine Spikes The chapter explores the concept of dopamine spikes in relation to addiction, particularly focusing on pornography and food. It discusses how circuits in the brain activated just before a positive experience can grow, setting a precedent for future behaviors. When a person engages in activities like pornography that lead to successful sexual gratification, these circuits become more dominant. This dominance can shape personality in a manner similar to addiction. The text draws parallels between these behaviors and addiction, noting that there has been research conducted on this topic.
• 10:30 - 14:00: Challenges of Social Relationships and Pornography's Impact The chapter begins with a discussion of super stimuli in animals, using the stickleback fish as an example. Male sticklebacks are aggressive towards other males due to the red dot on their bellies, which acts as a super stimulus. This concept is likened to the modern challenges in social relationships, particularly how exaggerated stimuli, such as the visuals in pornography, may impact human behavior and relationships by triggering exaggerated responses similar to those seen in animals.

The Truth About Pornography | Dr. Jordan Peterson & Dr. Andrew Huberman Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 nowadays I get a lot of questions um about pornography and the the discussion around pornography is always related to the discussion around masturbation um but let's just talk about pornography for a moment in this context of these primitive drives and these circuits within the hypothalamus which we were all born with that um clearly some of them are devoted to our progression as a species through reprodu
• 00:30 - 01:00 zero question about that sexual behavior being linked to reproduction not always but certainly we can all agree on that necessary precondition I hope we can still all agree on that but um last time I checked that's still true a sper and an egg met someplace in some context to create all of us okay we're still grounded in that pornography is something that I hear quite a lot from typically young males but sometimes young females or even older females who say that they can
• 01:00 - 01:30 see themselves trying to resist the desire to go look at it and it almost doesn't feel like a desire anymore they're sort of just in a um kind of a a compulsion that is that is almost unconscious but they're just aware of the fact that eting disorder like an eating disorder they're doing it they know they shouldn't be doing it and they can't help themselves and we could think about two ways to attack this if one believes it's a real concern and they certainly do so I do um I don't I would be if I if I had or do I pornography has
• 01:30 - 02:00 not been my thing and and I don't struggle with it but but when I hear from these people it's so clear that they're asking is it the prevalence of pornography out there or is it something really broken in them like are they broken but I don't know that I would say after having the discussion we've had thus far that they're broken it seems to me that it's like the as you said it's the manifestation of one part of their it's one personality within them well it's being it's being compulsively
• 02:00 - 02:30 rewarded so you know when when a when you see yourself moving towards the culmination of a desired goal a dopamine that's accompanied by dopamine release okay and so two things you know this but everybody who's listening might not there's two elements to that dopamine release one is pleasure but the other is that the dopamine imagine that there are circuits activated as you're acting what the dopamine does is increase the
• 02:30 - 03:00 probability that the circuits were that were activated just before the positive experience happened grow okay so now if you're engaged with pornography and that culminates in sex in in successful sexual satiation which it can that's what masturbation does then the whole personality that's oriented toward that set of stimuli is going to come to dominate it's very much like an addiction except it's it's you know there there has been there's been work done with generally
• 03:00 - 03:30 simpler animals on these phenomena called super stimuli I think it's stickleback fish where this was first observed so males I hope I get this right but I've got it approximately right I believe it's male sticklebacks will they're very aggressive towards other male sticklebacks and the reason they're aggressive is because the other male sticklebacks have a red dot on their bellies so they don't like red dots at all and so you can really enrage a stickleback with a red dot and if you use a red dot that's a little bigger and
• 03:30 - 04:00 a little brighter than the typical Red Dot you get a super stimulus it's virtually irresistible to the stickle back and it's weird because the maximal activation is produced by a stimulus that they wouldn't see in nature it slightly exceeds that's exactly what pornography does it's a super stimulus right and it's not surprising that young males in particular are susceptible to that because male sexuality in human beings is very visually oriented very and a lot of our brain is visual way more than virtually every other animal
• 04:00 - 04:30 certainly every other primate and ver and every other mammal and so we have a situation where any 13-year-old boy can see more hyper attractive super stimulus women in one day than the most successful man who ever lived a 100 years ago would have ever seen in his whole life yeah well that's a like an evolutionary ecological radical ecological transformation and the and it's worse because it's easily accessible so it takes no work right so
• 04:30 - 05:00 not only is it a super stimulus it's one that's at hand so to speak and the and the uh the analog in the food world would be highly palatable highly processed food yeah sugar fat combination you go into the other day I went into a gas station to use the restroom because I was traveling home for Thanksgiving and and I looked around I and I I thought this isn't a convenience store this is a pharmacy right everything that had chocolate also also seemed to have caffeine and color
• 05:00 - 05:30 everything every drink seemed to combine not just sugar but also caffeine and some other things that would provide s stimulants then you've got nicotin and and these things on their own aren't necessarily bad any one of these one elements in low low enough doses in frequent use Etc but maybe sugar being the one that that clearly I think uh deserves um deeper investigation right um but it just Ur to me much different than difference between manufacturing sugar and Manufacturing cocaine I mean you take something that's available in
• 05:30 - 06:00 its natural form in relatively low concentrations and purify it I mean cocoa leaves the natives used cocoa leaves forever as mild stimulant didn't seem to cause them any trouble but that's way different than cocaine right and sugar has the same arguably the same pathological properties well I didn't think we were going to go here but I think it's extremely appropriate and important that we do so I I know that you followed what is essentially an Elimination Diet for a number of years you eat meat right I eat meat vegetables
• 06:00 - 06:30 fruit and um some starches unrefined starches in any event one thing that I think is absolutely clear from following a clean diet so to speak of any kind but let's say of the sort that you follow or I follow is that you very soon learn the relationship between Taste of the food volume of the food macronutrient so protein fat or carbohydrate content micronutrients and satiation
• 06:30 - 07:00 which is if you think about it sort of like a big plate of broccoli or a big steak or something the brain learns and the hypothalamus learns the association between the taste the caloric content what else is in there and satiation if you think about highly processed food or even combinations of multiple ingredients that's absolutely impossible to do the brain can't parse what are the various things in here and how do they relate to my feelings of satisfaction it's the difference between a super drug and what I believe are the the elements that were that expl explain why you
• 07:00 - 07:30 think that's that link learned link about satiation can't be learned in the case of these processed foods yeah because in the context of these processed foods they're activating multiple neuron systems in the hypothalamus and gut we know that the gut has neurons that can respond to Sugar fatty acids and amino acid content and there's a you know this prominent theory that you know one of the main reasons we is to forage for amino amino acids that we'll eat until we get enough of the essential amino acids and we correlate that with taste but that the
• 07:30 - 08:00 gut has neurons where we know the gut has neurons that signal through the Vegas up through a little relay called the noo gangling if you want to look at it fun um fun name and then up to the dopaminergic centers of the brain which make us oh when we eat something that has a high uh essential amino acid content like a steak like a really tasty steak the neurons in the gut in a way that is independent of taste are signaling to the brain ah I'm getting essential amino acids you should eat more of this thing if those let's just say a small fraction of those amino
• 08:00 - 08:30 acids that are present in a candy bar in a you know a package of of Skittles which I'm I'm guessing there's very few of them if any you're going to continue to forage for food because those neurons will also respond to Sugar basically it will keep you eating until you get enough of those amino acids in other words there are two parallel tracks one within our tast system Pathways to satiation that totally right multiple Pathways to satiation one depending on taste one depending on actual nutrient content the mouth can only learn taste Association the mouth can't actually learn nutrient content the gut knows
• 08:30 - 09:00 nutrient content the problem is you take a food that is low in a micronutrient or macronutrient or essential amino acids are essential fatty acids after all there are no essential carbohydrates they're only essential amino acids and essential fatty acids right right right and it will keep you eating and it will keep the appetite system revving until you get enough of those now here's the issue if you've ever done this it's that's empty calories empty calories but what's so so in some ways um you know this again is an analog log to the whole
• 09:00 - 09:30 discussion around pornography masturbation and and reproduction right I'm not saying that reproduction is the be all end all of sexual activity but in the evolutionary sense it absolutely is right there's no question about that there's no moral judgment there that's just the reality so the the the the situation with food is is the following if we are eating without any gut level understanding of about what's coming in we will keep eating if you let me give you an example you probably haven't done this experiment in while but if you've ever just had you know ribeye steak or
• 09:30 - 10:00 two it's pretty satiating maybe you also have a salad if you're me or some broccoli or something like that if one takes then even after you've eaten all that one bite of pasta one bite of pasta the the next impulse is more yes right even though you already have enough essential amino acids from those Saks you're loosing you know uh threshold youve reach that Etc all that that good stuff why because blood glucose goes up and then you desire more because blood glucose elevations are linked directly to the dopamine org system so what I'm
• 10:00 - 10:30 basically trying to say here is that I do think that there are elements to our food modern food if you will it seems like it's you know anything but modern in the sense that it's worse for us than the more primitive foods but highly processed foods pornography any drug that spikes dopamine dramatically like methampetamine for instance any behavior that spikes dopamine dramatically that very quickly hijacks these circuits and to me the way to to teach those circuits a a calmer more um prudent version of
• 10:30 - 11:00 themselves right to enter a different hypothalamic uh activation pattern is to start breaking the things down into their Essential Elements right about the motivation the pleasure Etc to Tamp all that down I mean we know that for pornography if the pornography is very extreme then less extreme pornography doesn't seem to work well that's because there's also a novelty kick in dopaminergic striving right I mean so with any B basic competitive pleasure there's
• 11:00 - 11:30 a dopaminergic kick but with any novelty there's also a dopaminergic kick so there's an optimized threshold for novelty and repetitive striving that plays out in pornography so um there's the direct effect of the stimulus as such but the there's variation in the stimulus that's also novel and so you it's a common pattern for pornographic usage to become more
• 11:30 - 12:00 what would you say fetishistic that's one way of thinking about it as it progresses because that that keeps the novelty alive that's very dangerous that's a very dangerous development right and I would venture in a very different domain that if you were to eat your steak slathered in barbecue sauce for a couple of weeks going back to the way that you eat them now which by the way this is a great opportunity to educate people about something that you taught me when we had dinner last which is that if you're going to order a steak order a Pittsburgh Char the Char on the outside is incredibly tasty they're we love that um the Umami taste is that
• 12:00 - 12:30 wish you have a devoted taste receptor to that it's complex yeah so and if they don't know what a Pittsburgh Char is then maybe you're in the wrong restaurant or you need to educate them but incredibly satiating delicious right but if you were to slather those steaks in in a bunch of things I would suspect that after a while your plain steaks wouldn't taste as good but certainly but the way to make them taste good again would be to eat them plain for a period of time in which the stuff the all the condiments Etc would start to become aversive I do believe that when we return to the the sort of most um
• 12:30 - 13:00 naturally satisfying mode of engaging with these uh with these circuits here we're talking about food and sex in parallel that they become especially satiating and I think that you know in hearing from all these people that are addicted to pornography and they're not addicted like they telling me they love it and they can't stop they're telling me it's no longer working for them that the that there's this you know diminishment in the amount of dopamine that they're getting over time and they feel trapped within it and they have no sense whatsoever because they haven't
• 13:00 - 13:30 been socialized you to go out and find a real relationship a real sexual relationship or a relationship of any well it also it's also there is some evidence suggesting too that if you've been socialized into pornography sexuality it's actually quite difficult to establish a sexual relationship with an actual partner now I would say to some degree that's always been difficult because it's a complex form of behavior but the introduction of pornography well it sets up a whole landscape of expectation for example
• 13:30 - 14:00 that's not necessarily going to play out that well in the real world let's say and there's also a learning of those biological systems in the brain to um evoke arousal by observing sex as opposed to participating complet completely different so some of these um right that's voer right you're basically learning to be a Voyer right right and so you think about young brains that are highly plastic yeah learning that so the returning yeah we have no idea what to make of that because especially for young men because when they hit puberty
• 14:00 - 14:30 sexuality becomes a very uh insistent force and we have no idea what effect pornography has on the development of male sexuality none [Music]