Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction

Evolution shaped this basic human drive to build families: sexual desire is one of our most powerful motivational forces, and has been essential to the flourishing of the human race. Yet pornography transforms that drive into a force that primarily motivates the completely solitary and unproductive activity of masturbation.

It's amazing what you learn doing this. I think I now fully understand the saying that 'knowledge is power.' Once you know how something works and how it affects you, it's much easier to muster the willpower to make a change if you wish.

But desensitisation can also take the form of escalating to new genres, sometimes harder and stranger, or even disturbing. Remember: shock, surprise and anxiety can jack up dopamine.