The Molecule of More

THE MOLECULE OF MORE

more often. Both he and his wife worked full time, and because of her
busy  schedule, she found it difficult to  satisfy him.” After he retired at  age 
sixty-two, things became worse. He made sexual advances to two young
ladies in his extended family as well as to women in the neighborhood.
Eventually, his wife had to leave her job to attend to his sexual urges.^3
Yet another patient expressed his hypersexuality by spending hours
every day in internet adult chat rooms—but even otherwise healthy
people taking no medication at all are susceptible to the dopamine call
of pornography, supercharged by the internet.
Of course, you don’t need Parkinson’s medication coursing through
your brain to have your life upended by sexual obsession. Consider the
fearsome triad of dopamine, technology, and porn.

MORE, MORE, MORE: DOPAMINE AND

THE POWER OF PORNOGRAPHY

Noah was a twenty-eight-year-old man who sought help because he was

unable to stop viewing pornography. He grew up in a Catholic household,

and the first time he was exposed to pornography was at the age of fifteen.

He was on the internet searching for something unrelated when he ran across

a picture of a naked woman. He said from that moment he was hooked.

At first, things weren’t too bad. He was accessing the internet over a

dial-up modem and “it took ages for the pictures to load.” He was lucky.

Technology was limiting his daily dose. He described the pictures he started

with as “tame.” Over time, both of these would change. Broadband allowed

him to access pictures instantly, and he could now add video to his daily

routine. Tame material gave way to depictions of more extreme acts as his

tolerance for pornographic thrills increased.

He considered his behavior to be a sin, a moral failing, and he used his

relationship with the church to get his compulsion under control. He went

3 This problem primarily affects men, but women are not immune. In the Mayo Clinic

series of thirteen patients, two were female, both single and sexually abstinent

prior to starting treatment.