NASHVILLE, TN – Many a young man was warned that looking at porn would make him go blind – and now researchers have found that there’s some truth to the statement, however minimal.A Vanderbilt University research team found that when test subjects were asked to look for a specific image and then were shown an assortment of “disturbing” shots, as well as benign photos of landscapes or buildings, targeted visuals that appeared in sequence closer to more unsettling images tended to be overlooked. “As university psychologist David Zald explains it, “The closer the negative pictures were to the target image, the more frequently the subject failed to spot the target.” The same effect was found to exist when “disturbing” images were replaced by erotic ones.

According to Zald, images that occur one-fifth of a second after an image that triggers a strong emotional response tend to be forgotten. When the same images appear after a more neutral photo, they are more likely to be remembered. Zald and his cohorts believe this is related to what they call “rubbernecking.” In other words, even when a person tries not to be drawn into a visual situation that rattles or distracts them, emotions have a tendency to cause them to focus on the image and retain its influence for a certain amount of time. While doing that, details concerning other things happening tend to be lost. As the Vanderbilt team explains it, “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.”

One of the interesting conclusions that the research staff reached was that “fearful or cautious” people find it more difficult to put aside emotional images than do more carefree individuals that have confronted “negative or frightening stimuli.” In the long run, it may be that exposure to porn and violence have less to do with short-term memory loss than does overall emotional balance and perspective.