“Porn is all of the sex — without the body… It gives you every aspect of a sexual encounter without the physical touch or the smells.” – Dr. William Struthers

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Top medical researchers explained earlier this month at a pastors gathering in North Carolina how pornography use physically affects the human brain, revealing information not well-known outside of the medical and scientific communities.

“Porn is all of the sex — without the body,” Dr. William Struthers, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Wheaton College in Chicago, told TheBlaze. “It gives you every aspect of a sexual encounter without the physical touch or the smells.”

During his presentation at the event, dubbed “The Set Free Summit,” Struthers explained and elaborated on many topics, from how the human brain changes under repeated pornography use to how the brain naturally has its own “mirroring” effect to how natural bodily hormones — such as oxytocin — can bond a person to pixels on a screen.

In a sit-down interview with TheBlaze, Struthers revealed why a person can become addicted to pornography.

“When we talk about pornography as a drug, we’ve really got the cart before the horse. Really, the only reason why any drugs are addictive is that they act on the brain’s natural pleasure systems,” he said. “Sex is a great example of what the brain is made for when it comes to pleasure. Sex is very pleasurable for human beings the majority of the time.”

“The brain has these natural pleasure circuits — these circuits that are designed to give us the feeling of closeness, of excitement, of love — and so the only reason why these drugs, like crack, morphine, methamphetamine, or any of those have any pleasurable consequences at all is because they act on these natural systems that are already there,” Struthers continued. “So a better way to talk about heroin is that heroin is actually injected orgasm.”