Let's face it. After 20 years of exposure to thousands of hours of pornography, Jack's brain didn't work the way it did when he started secretly viewing it as a young adult. In fact, it hardly worked at all.

Eventually Jack's wife, Laurie Hall, left him and wrote her true-life experience in the book An Affair of the Mind. Mark Kastleman quotes from her book at NetNanny.com, including a quote from Dr. Ron Miller after he examined Jack. Dr. Miller told Jack: "You've destroyed your mind by fantasizing. You've dug a deep channel going in one direction. The rest of your mind is atrophied!"

The occasional use of porn for a few minutes of secret pleasure as a young adult planted the seeds of his neurological destruction. It reduced Jack's high-level engineering brain, trained through a college degree and years in a professional management position, into a bumbling nightmare of blank staring and the inability to remember even the simplest activities of daily living (such as boiling tea in the kitchen) or to hold a meaningful conversation.

Jack's good income as a regional manager had been reduced to a menial laborer's wage of packing bags of chocolates for $7.25 per hour.

Sadly, Jack's is not an isolated story. Vast numbers of people view pornography and suffer the consequences. But how does porn damage brain structure and function? And what can be done about this problem?

A rampant evil

A curse of modern society is that all people, including Vertical Thought readers, have to fight exposure to pornography in its astonishing array of forms. In our debased global culture, porn is not going away.

Consider these facts about porn from various news sources:

* 25 percent of search engine requests are pornographic (68 million per day).
* 70 percent of 18- to 24-year-old males visit porn sites in a typical month.
* 20 percent of men admit to watching porn on computers at work.
* 2.5 billion pornographic e-mails are sent daily.

In this porn-laced world, hundreds of millions of people are vulnerable to developing the psychological disorder of sex addiction. The porn industry's targeted destination is your brain. It bulldozes over the higher-thinking functions of the frontal lobes and cortex where logic and values and relationships are processed. Put another way, porn is designed to condition the human heart to be evil in its intents.
Porn changes brain circuitry

Mark Kastleman also quotes Dr. Gary Lynch, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Irvine, who explains what happens when the powerful imagery in pictures and action-packed pornographic scenes hit the human eye and when they are processed deep down in the many layers of brain structure.

"What we are saying here is that an event which lasts half a second, within five to ten minutes has produced a structural change that is in some ways as profound as the structural changes one sees in [brain] damage."

Mark Kastleman concludes: "Stored away in the cells of your brain and body are all the things you have ever seen, heard, felt, tasted or smelled. That's why Dr. Miller was able to tell Jack after 20 years of porn, ‘You've destroyed your mind by fantasizing. You've dug a deep channel going in one direction.' Jack had literally developed a one-track mind."

Overcoming this sin

God condemns pornography because it is horribly destructive of the spectacular and wonderful human potential. The human brain needs to be preserved and helped to develop the full capacities for vertical thinking for which this magazine is designed. So here is what we need to do to overcome this ever-present influence in today's media.

1. Immunize yourself from our world's porn-saturated media and culture by having a totally focused spiritual connection with God through regular prayer and Bible study.

2. Stay away from pornography in all forms. Understand that curiosity killed the cat. And it can kill you, too (spiritually speaking)!

The research shows that seeing is actually doing when it comes to how our brains work. Jesus Christ said that looking at a woman with lustful intent—and not just the physical act—is adultery (Matthew 5:28). He was 2,000 years ahead of the detailed findings of our neurosciences today. That's because He created the human mind.

3. Develop a "noble and good heart" (Luke 8:15). Be totally dedicated in upholding God's standards, words and character as the basis for your own thinking. You need a very strong conviction against pornography, to the point where you find it disgusting and repulsive. We must look at it as a form of mental illness and a destructive evil instead of pleasurable entertainment.

4. When you use the Internet, be very clear about what you plan to look up. Don't allow the natural boredom of life to lead you to explore things that will damage your mind.

5. If you have exposed yourself to pornography, realize that we have a Savior who will both forgive and will provide the spiritual help to overcome all our character flaws. Jesus wants us to repent and "sin no more" (John 8:11).

God designed the human brain as the physical mechanism for the development of the human mind, which He wants to transform within us to be like His (Romans 12:2). Our ultimate destiny is to be His children in His family forever! Don't let anything damage your mind and stop you from reaching that destiny! VT