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Dr. Valerie Voon is a global authority on addiction and the leading researcher in the neuroscience department at the prestigious University of Cambridge in England. According to her faculty profile on the Cambridge Neuroscience department website: “The Voon lab focuses on mechanisms underlying compulsive disorders such as substance and behavioral addictions.”
With a medical degree in neuropsychiatry and a Ph.D. in neuroscience, Dr. Voon is on the forefront of understanding the brain, how it works, and how it is affected by addiction. So when her long-awaited study that was highlighted in the 2013 UK documentary Porn On The Brain was finally released, it provided groundbreaking findings on how viewing pornography affects the brain, and how compulsive pornography users have real similarities to drug addicts.
The study, titled Neural Correlates of Sexual Cue Reactivity in Individuals with and without Compulsive Sexual Behaviours, found strong evidence of sensitization in compulsive porn users. Sensitization is hyper-reactivity to cues that lead to craving and then to use. To put it simply, porn users become super sensitive to things that trigger them, which then give them the seemingly uncontrollable urge to look at porn. This process is considered to be the main change in the brain when it comes to defining addiction. As lead researcher Dr. Voon said about the study:
“There are clear differences in brain activity between patients who have compulsive sexual behaviour and healthy volunteers. These differences mirror those of drug addicts.”
To read the full article at Fight the New Drug, click here.
