LOS ANGELES—If it's Christmastime—and yes, some of us acknowledge Christmas—that means it's also porn-watching time for the fine folk at AVN, who annually spend the run-up to the New Year watching more porn in a few months than the average person watches during their entire life, all in preparation for the announcement of the AVN Awards nominations in late December and subsequent voting. It's a bitch of a job that someone has to do, but now we understand why, come January, we seem to have trouble remembering shit like one another's names, the ages of our kids and the exact wording of the Bill of Rights. You know, the sorts of things we usually have on the tip of our tongues.
It turns out it's the porn. "A group of German researchers are reporting a positive correlation between the amount of porn you watch and the power to hold important things in your memory," reported Vice.com a few days ago. "So while masturbating before you're scheduled to give that important presentation to your boss might sound like a great way to take the edge off before stepping into the boardroom, don't do it. While you're mopping up, the porn you just watched is wiping your memory."
Vice is joking, of course, but the researchers surely are not. "Pictorial stimuli in all conditions seem to provide a lot of helpful information for the memorization and successful handling of the WM (working memory) task," they state in the study. "Within the pornographic picture condition, the indicators of sexual arousal are able to explain WM performance. Pornographic picture processing is associated with sexual arousal, which leads to interference of WM processes.
"The results of attention-capturing and cognitive interference through pornographic stimuli can also be discussed with respect to problems reported by individuals using Internet sex applications, such as an excessive Internet pornography consumption," they continue. "Some individuals report problems occurring during or after pornography consumption on the Internet, such as neglecting, forgetting or missing responsibilities, missing appointments, and losing sleep, leading to negative consequences in those individuals’ lives."
Their conclusion? "The results of this study imply strong interference of WM by needs to masturbate arising from pornographic pictures."
In other words, the desire to jerk off after seeing some arousing porn takes a priority over remembering to take out the garbage. But would it interfere with, say, remembering to pick up your kid from school? They don't say, of course. Nor do they address WM after masturbating, probably because the study's subjects weren't allowed to masturbate after seeing the porn images. In other words, the study also involved torture.
You can read the study here. I read the whole thing. It gave me a headache so I immediately sought out some AVN Award-nominated websites and the headache went away. Draw your own conclusions.
