I recently read an article that I felt needed to be shared. It was featured in The Atlantic and the title of it was “How Sex Affects Intelligence, and Vice Versa”.
The subtitle was “New research says sexual activity can grow brain cells. Keeping them may be another matter.” Here’s an excerpt:
“In April, a team from the University of Maryland reported that middle-aged rats permitted to engage in sex showed signs of improved cognitive function and hippocampal function. In November, a group from Konkuk University in Seoul concluded that sexual activity counteracts the memory-robbing effects of chronic stress in mice. ‘Sexual interaction could be helpful,’ they wrote, ‘for buffering adult hippocampal neurogenesis and recognition memory function against the suppressive actions of chronic stress.’”
Honestly, that’s not a shocking revelation. There are all kinds of articles that reveal there are many health benefits that come with having sex, even among humans. Sex is good for your heart, lowers your blood pressure, burns calories, reduces pain, improves sleep, boosts your libido and yes, there is a lot of medical evidence to support that it also relieves stress (no wonder Paul said that married people should not deprive one another of it! (I Corinthians 7:5).
However, it was the two following paragraphs that really caught my attention:
“So growing brain cells through sex does appear to have some basis in scientific fact. But there’s some debate over whether fake sex—pornography—could be harmful. Neuroscientists from the University of Texas recently argued that excessive porn viewing, like other addictions, can result in permanent ‘anatomical and pathological’ changes to the brain…
Whether or not porn ‘addiction’ literally damages the brain, even brief viewing of pornographic images does interfere with people’s ‘working memory’—the ability to mentally juggle and pay attention to multiple items. A study published last October in the Journal of Sex Research tested the working memory of 28 healthy individuals when they were asked to keep track of neutral, negative, positive, or pornographic stimuli. ‘Results revealed worse working memory performance in the pornographic picture condition,’ concluded Matthias Brand, head of the cognitive psychology department at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.”
Porn will jack your memory up. (Tweet This!) Hmph. Just one more thing to add to the long (LONG) list of why we shouldn’t watch it. Personally, I’m trying right now to remember my porn-watching days to see if I can vouch for that. I can’t remember (LOL). I will say this, though. Porn makes you not really want to care about much else and so I guess in a way, that’s the same thing. Can’t remember, don’t care to remember…what’s the difference?
The Message Version of Ecclesiastes 7:18 states that a man who fears God deals with all of reality, not just a part of it. Although we spend a lot of time talking about the fact that porn is rooted in lust and that porn causes you to focus on images and yourself when God actually created sex so that a husband and wife could focus on one another (Genesis 2:24-25, I Corinthians 6:16-20-Message, I Corinthians 7:1-5), what that article reveals is another reason why porn is not just not God’s best for us but extremely toxic is because, well, it’s fake. It’s meant to deceive us into thinking that what we are looking at is real.
To the point that many people find themselves preferring “fake sex” to real sex…
Fantasizing rather than living in the real world.
Mentally obsessing over actors rather than being intimate with an actual person.
Masturbating rather than engaging in sex with their covenant partner.
So the next time you’re tempted to go to your favorite site, remember that one, it could mess with your memory and two, you are wasting moments that you’ll never get back on something that’s fake.
And you deserve so much better than that.