Porn Makes You Go Blind - Ahh, My Virgin Eyes!

A Vanderbilt University research squad has illustrated what your Mother knew all along, that smut will make you go blind. Yeah, it's official. Truth be told, you will lose site temporarily. The same apparently applies to images of blood and guts. Of course eyeballing snaps of carnage does not carry the same penalty of eternal damnation as ogling smut, but it's close enough to throw into the study. Vanderbilt University psychologist David Zald and his team exposed guinea pigs to a barrage of "disturbing" images interspersed with landscape or architectural snaps, telling them to scan the images for a certain target image. The press release explains "An irrelevant, emotionally negative or neutral picture preceded the target by two to eight items. The closer the negative pictures were to the target image, the more frequently the subject failed to spot the target. In a subsequent study, which has not yet been published, the researchers substituted erotic for negative images and found the same basic effect."

The bottom line is that people fail to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after neutral images. It's related to the "rubbernecking" concept - the process whereby you try and drive by an accident without having a quick look around. Our emotions of concern, fear and curiosity cause us to stare out the window at the accident and slow to a crawl on the road. The same process is at work when you attempt to motor past an attractive member of the opposite/same sex (according to taste) and not cop an eyeful. A strong visual or emotional stimulus temporarily disables your faculties. The Vanderbilt blurb notes that previous studies have demonstrated that there are limits to how much information we can hold in our visual short-term memory and that we often miss visual images that pass right before our eyes if we are paying attention to something else.

Perhaps that is why if I am out on a date or even out alone, but interested in someone else, that a hot girl can walk by me and I may not even notice. Then again, maybe I am gay! Nah. Only those with a healthy disregard for danger should attempt to drive past a particularly nasty multiple pile-up while flicking though a copy of Playboy. As for the rest of us, our eyes will be firmly fixed forward and Miss October back on the top shelf where she belongs.