Researchers at Cambridge University have discovered that the brain activity of people addicted to porn is the same as those struggling with addiction to drugs or alcohol.

The Daily Mail is reporting that MRI scans conducted by researchers on subjects who are addicted to porn revealed that the places in the brain that react to seeing explicit material react in the same way as the brain of an alcoholic who sees an advertisement for alcohol.

The brains of young men obsessed with online porn are said to have “lit up like Christmas trees” when shown erotic images. The part of the brain that “lit up” is involved in processing reward, motivation and pleasure, and is the same part that is active in drug and alcohol addicts.

“We found greater activity in an area of the brain called the ventral striatum, which is a reward center, involved in processing reward, motivation and pleasure,” said lead scientist and neuropsychiatrist Dr. Valerie Voon to the Sunday Times.  “When an alcoholic sees an ad for a drink, their brain will light up in a certain way and they will be stimulated in a certain way. We are seeing this same kind of activity in users of pornography.”

The research was conducted on 19 addictive pornography users and a control group of people who said they were not compulsive users. Although the results have not yet been published, the research is considered to be ground-breaking.

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