Watching Internet Porn Will Kill Your Memory

Bad news, everyone. The greatest convenience the internet has brought us, something our predecessors could never have imagined– 24/7 free porn at the click of a button has been stained by science. Our collective porn habit was sure to bring upon our heads a day of reckoning, but until now we were all happy to avert our eyes from the blinding light of the truth of internet smut and keep them locked on the screen instead. But now, my friends, the time has come to face the groovy porn music.

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. 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.

The study, published in the Journal of Sex Research, sought answers to why some people complain about "missing sleep, forgetting appointments, disregarding partnerships, and overlooking job responsibilities" after soaking their minds in the warm glow of porn. Researchers are coming at it from the notion that internet porn causes "negative life consequences" and "a disadvantage in decision making."

In the experiment, 28 straight guys at the University of Duisburg-Essen, where the researchers work, looked at a bunch of photos containing positive, negative, neutral, and pornographic stimuli. A neutral photo is a person, say, working at a desk; a negative one showed a mugging or a guy brandishing a knife; a positive one showed people laughing and scoring touchdowns; and pornographic images showed… well, you'd know it if you saw it.

Read the rest over at the new Motherboard.VICE.com.