Max Planck Institute for Human Development

The result is a dopamine response that dwarfs what any other digital stimulus produces in you.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, in a study published in JAMA Psychiatry led by Simone Kuhn, found that higher pornography consumption was associated with reduced gray matter volume in the right caudate of the striatum, a key region of your reward system, and reduced functional connectivity between the striatum and the prefrontal cortex.

In plain language, frequent pornography use was associated with a smaller, less responsive reward center, and weaker executive control over it.

If you're running the dopamine recalibration protocol, pornography is the single most important stimulus for you to eliminate during phase three, not reduce.

Um, I will say we did, um, an exercise study ourselves.

Um, and so I was col- I was, uh, collaborating with a bunch of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and they had, um, this, uh, pretty large sample, um, where they could randomly assign people to an exercise group or not.

And we actually had the opportunity to measure neural selectivity using functional MRI.

And, um, so there we did find that, um, exercise was as- um, was associated with sort of preserved neural selectivity over time, whereas, uh, the folks who were not in the exercise group showed, um, a decline over age.