Speaker A
Level people can opt out of that, but one of the absolutely pathologic situations for any animal or human is to be able to access repeated dopamine surges without effort or any pursuit that's self-directed or that's directed, I should say. So, for instance, cocaine, a drug which potently increases dopamine, or methamphetamine, which potently increases dopamine but doesn't require any sort of adaptive action or pursuit except to acquire the drug and spend money on it. No sacrifice. No sacrifice. So what essentially ends up happening is the circuit that gets rewarded is only the drug-seeking behavior, and no other behavior will give the kind of potent dopamine release that cocaine or methamphetamine will, which is why they are so pernicious. Now, likewise, I'm not well... plus, plus, they have that powerful reinforcing effect, right? So not only do you get that kick, but what's reinforced by the dopamine release is the behaviors that were right prior, particularly prior to the ingestion. And if all that is is the drug-taking behavior, that's all that develops. That's right. You build that monster inside your head. That's right. See where you're going on the pornography? Right. So I was starting to get a lot of questions. I was kind of surprised. I thought, well, you know, I'm male and, you know, maybe that's why they feel comfortable asking. If you were saying that, we're asking about pornography, and they were asking, you know, I realize we want to, um, you know, I'll just be direct about it. They were asking whether or not masturbation was bad. They were asking whether or not masturbation with ejaculation was particularly bad. And here's my stance on this. I'm a biologist and a neuroscientist, not a psychologist, but what we know for sure is that if an individual repeatedly engages in this circuitry, let's say masturbation and pornography with increasingly potent forms of stimulation that are on a screen, a couple of things happen. First of all, what's being reinforced? What's being reinforced is a high dopaminergic response to watching other people engage in sexual behavior, which is very different than being in a first-person sexual experience. Okay, so right there, you know that what's being reinforced is not actually any kind of improvement in communication skills. It's voyeurism. And as these questions started to come in more and more, I started to realize there were a lot of kind of undertones of people talking about fear of or experience with sexual dysfunction that clearly pornography can lead to. And here I'm specifically talking about males. I actually don't know the literature on females, so here I'm talking about females don't use visual pornography to the same degree; they use literary pornography, I see. So yeah. So then you start to think about, okay, what happens in the cascade or the arc of sexual arousal and orgasm? What happens is that initially there's a parasympathetically dominant phase, meaning if somebody is too stressed, they actually can't engage in sexual behavior. The arousal response doesn't occur. Erection is blunted. But the actual orgasm response and ejaculation is strongly associated with the so-called sympathetic nervous system, which has nothing to do with sympathy, has everything to do with a kind of a stress response. And then it reverses to a parasympathetic response, and then a hormone called prolactin increases dramatically, automatically after ejaculation in males. What does that do? That blunts dopamine release and testosterone for a very long period of time, which makes sense if pair bonding and sort of, you know, in our species, anywhere there's this idea that then other molecules would be exchanged with partners, pair bonding, potential for raising mates, etc., without getting into a huge discussion about that. The point is this: masturbation and pornography are potently tapping into the dopamine system and can undermine the very processes which I consider healthy processes of finding innate, you know, dating communication, eventually, if it's appropriate, sexual interaction, etc. It's undermining. Oh, so okay, so here's a question. If you're seeking sexual release through pornography and you go through the whole cycle and you get a prolactin release, do you bond with yourself? So this is very interesting. The biology explains it as what's left there is a kind of an open loop, a kind of an emptiness, right? Because bonding with the self is a complicated notion. I mean, there's a healthy version of that, of course, loving oneself and, yeah, and self-referencing. And again, this is more your domain than mine in terms of what a healthy self-relation is. But in the absence of a real partner, of an absence of a real sexual partner, there's an open loop of neurochemicals including oxytocin and prolactin. The dopamine, remember, dopamine goes up during pursuit, anticipation, then peaks, and then crashes below baseline after orgasm and ejaculation. So this kind of low that people fear is putting them into an a-motivated state. We can think of this, if I were to kind of expand on it, would be it's this kind of a neurochemical psychological equivalent of making your home environment filthy for a while, not actually putting you into this positive amplification of dopamine. So it depletes the dopamine system and is, likewise, in drugs of abuse and addiction, it eventually depletes the dopamine system. Initially, there's a huge dopamine surge with drugs of abuse like methamphetamine and cocaine, but over time people are using more and more to achieve what is not such a great high. You even see this a little bit with kind of consumption of energy drinks, like people are taking more and more chemicals within their energy drinks, and they're thinking about loud, fast music, energy drinks. It's kind of stacking of dopaminergic tools. Now, that's not as pathologic. In fact, I'm... there are some energy drinks I'll occasionally drink, and I enjoy them. I don't think we need to be entirely afraid of pursuing or engaging in things that release dopamine. Obviously, healthy sexual behavior, food that we love, social engagement, all of these things can be dopaminergic. It's the big peaks in dopamine that are not associated with any prior effort or organization of self that are particularly dangerous for the human being. Yeah, well, you could see that. That you could see that, that's a cardinal danger of affluence then. That's right. This is why the children of, you know... you know, that's right. You know, you cannot get rats addicted to cocaine if they live in their natural environments. Is that right? You can only get rats addicted to cocaine if they're isolated rats in a cage. Yeah, they won't bar press for cocaine in the natural environment, and it's because they have alternative sources of dopamine energy gratification. Very interesting. So yeah, but very interesting. Yeah, the children of very wealthy people who are overindulged, I've seen that many times, many, many times, and it is a very sad sight. Yeah, well, they're not optimally deprived, eh? And that issue of optimal deprivation, that's a killer issue for an affluent society. We're going to have to stop because it's been more than an hour and a half, and I don't want to stop because there were a bunch of things I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to talk to you about, and I should let everybody know who's listening, if you go to Dr. Huberman's podcast, you can hear them discuss some of these things we were going to talk about: dream, sleep, rest, and learning, because we didn't talk about.
