During an appearance on American Family Radio (AFR), Heidi Olson of Paradigm Shift Training and Consulting said pornography deeply impacts the brain.
"If you look at studies around what's going on, it's very similar to other types of substances that are addicting," says Olson, RN, MSN, CPN, SANE-P. "If you look at the way a brain is impacted by drugs or something like gambling, pornography does the exact same thing."
When an adult brain sees pornography, Olson said it gets a huge chemical release that causes adults to feel good.
"It creates a neural pathway, basically a reward pathway saying, 'Oh, when I do this behavior, I get this dopamine hit. I like that. I'm going to go back and do it again and again'," explains Olson.
Over time, chemical releases are happening so frequently that a person does not get that same feeling or "high" anymore. Much like a drug addict has to use more drugs to get a hit, Olson said a person addicted to pornography has to view more pornography. This includes "more deviant, violent, shocking content."
When it comes to a child's brain, the same thing is happening, and the child's brain is not even fully developed yet.
"We know the prefrontal cortex gets physically impacted by porn usage, so now we're talking about kids who don't even have that part of their brain fully developed, and that's going to stunt growth there," says Olson. "We also know that it's going to impact the child's brain in multiple ways. Kids have mirror neurons in their brain. So, I'm watching this content. I'm now going to mirror what I'm seeing happening."
That, said Olson, is contributing to a rise of child-on-child sexual assault.
"We see a lot of kids assault other kids based on what they've learned in pornography," states Olson.
