HealthyGamerGG - The Science of Gooning

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

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Today, we're going to talk about, I guess, the science of gooning. And I say, I guess, because gooning is such a new phenomenon. And for those of you that don't know, and I don't know myself entirely, gooning, I guess, is like taking the act of masturbation and sort of min-maxing it to the maximal level. And this is something that I've seen a lot of commentary on. I had this conversation with Ludwig where he explained this concept of gooning to me, where people have these goon caves. A lot of people are bringing up that this is similar to gooning.

What is gooning? This is when someone takes this, the act of masturbation, adds a certain amount of edging to it, and basically min-maxes the masturbation act. And so gooning is something that has been growing in the nether regions of the internet. But as with most things that are on the internet, they were originally born in the nether regions.

Even the memes today that a lot of people, a lot of these like gen alpha, Gen Z kids, take for granted, we're actually born in the nether regions of 4chan. And my guess is that gooning is the same. But as this thing grows, we, of course, can try to understand what's going on. We can extrapolate from principles of science on masturbation, orgasm, sexual pleasure, which we'll be diving into today to help you all understand some of the basics of, like, how sex works in the physiology and in the brain.

We'll also use an example of, like, drugs, so why people like to have sex on drugs. drugs and what the neuroscience of that is, and we'll try to unpack this concept of Gooning. Hey, all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. Kay's Guide to Mental Health. It combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a choose-your-own-adventure format. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. Before we get specifically to Gooning, we're going to start actually with the medical history of masturbation.

So this is a picture of a masturbator from a Swedish textbook in 1918. And if we look at this, this is one of us, chat. This is a truly degenerate person, right? This is like when we think of the internet. This is not actually who we are anymore, right? So we're the healthy gamer community and we're like decent human beings. But when someone says like a masturbator, this is like what people envision. It's sort of viewed as a moral failing.

It's viewed as someone who can't get laid, right? this guy can't get laid. And then it also has some negative effects in our health. So what I actually did is like went back and looked at like the old medical texts around masturbation. And a long time ago, like if we look at like the 1600s, we sort of have some people that think that masturbation is actually like not a bad thing. So for example, there's one person from the 1600s who said that masturbation is a good

method of strengthening the penis of young boys. in order to make them better able afterwards to procreate is to pull on the penis vigorously and repeatedly in order to make it longer. Now, as you kind of progress through history, you find that the attitude towards masturbation changes. And one of the main people who sort of was very anti-masturbation was this guy, a Swiss doctor named to sew. And this is the actual old, like, medical text. Okay. So this is, I guess this was a Project Gutenberg ePub translation. but this was like published in 1839, okay?

So this is a text by a medical doctor who's talking about like the dangers of masturbation. And there's some really fascinating stuff in here, okay? So special symptoms of venereal excess. One of the most constant effects of excessive masturbation is the loss of flesh. The loss of flesh and strength is not the only symptom of consumption, which undermine gradually the oninist. Onanist is basically the, the highbrow Swiss word for masturbator.

Many signs indicate that all the functions are affected, as it were, with a loss of strength. The countenance instead of the vermilion glow of health is pale and without freshness, or of a yellowish, earthy, leaden, and livid taint. The lips lose their color. A bluer circle surrounds the eyes. The eyelids are puffed out with edema. The flesh is... edema means swelling.

The flesh is soft and flaccid. The pulses small and feeble. Upon the slightest motion or during sleep, the forehead, chest, and palms of the hands are bathed with profuse perspiration. In some patients, the hands and feet are edematous. Okay, there's also general atony, which means the weakness of the, of the musculature. This Swiss medical doctor in 1839 is basically describing a sweaty nerd. So it also affects the mind.

So the heart and mind suffer as much as the body from excess masturbation. The oninist experiences for dissembling his tastes and for concealing a habit which is both ridiculous and vile, renders him taciturn. This is an angry nerd. His eyes are turned from the gaze of those around. He loves solitude, avoids the world, and is embarrassed. And is almost as if it were ashamed of himself. His manner might sometimes pass for timidity. We might almost say for innocence, but it is entirely changed when being in a way.

in the company with a professed on aist, he no longer feels restraint. Okay. He constantly experiences a sensation of sadness and ennui, which is impressed on his countenance and which is the natural consequence of restlessness and fatigue, which he feels constantly. He is as sad as one is when suffering and when debility is felt. This inward feeling of shame, which is banished with difficulty when the actions reputed to be bad or often repeated, must also contribute to his melancholy and sadness.

But perhaps the worst feelings which torment him are regret and remorse. So the serial masturbator is someone who has a loss of flesh. His eyes are filled with circles. And by the way, these are all men, right? Because back in 1839, we didn't know medically that women could masturbate. There's actually some information about the clitoris and stuff like that. So that was, we were aware of that. But it's mostly boys and men that people are talking about.

But then there's also like this feeling of sadness and melancholy and like all this kind of stuff that comes from masturbation. Now, at the end of the video, we'll talk a little bit about sort of the medical take on masturbation today. But this is basically what people thought were like, you know, this is what masturbators were. They were like these people who were sort of like weak, like basically internet trolls that it's describing the symptomatology of being an internet troll, which is kind of scary, right? So I wonder how much that has an impact in the world that we play in. And this is exactly what's going on with gooning. So what's happening is we're taking these fringe parts of the internet and we're sort of like learning how to take advantage

of our bodies. And I'm seeing this trend so much with this idea of brain rot where like human beings are figuring out how to make things within them tick. So platforms are doing this to us, but then they're not the only ones, right? We're also doing this to ourselves. And what's happening in the gooning community is they are experimenting with the physiology and neuroscience of sexual pleasure and basically trying to min-max it. And if we want to understand what's going on, we have to understand the neuroscience and physiology of sexual pleasure.

So we're going to talk a little bit about understanding the basic mechanism of sexual pleasure. So the first thing to understand is that the sexual system is a combination of the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system. So this is our rest and digest and this is our fight or flight. So normally only one of these systems is active. So if we're fighting for our life, then our sympathetic nervous system is active. If we're playing a sport, if we're competing, then this is active. If we're giving a presentation, our sympathetic nervous system is active. And then our rest and digest system is active when we're getting a massage or we're relaxing at home. We're watching TV. We're like chilling. We're viving. We're sleeping. So it's one or the other. But what happens in

sexuality is we actually have a combination of the two. And the way that we balance these systems, the more that we sort of activate our rest and digest, the further away we'll get from kind of explicit orgasm. And this is what's needed for erection, for example, in the male. And this also includes clitoral vasodilation. So even like the engorgement of the clitoris is the same thing. It's the same mechanism. So this is, let's say, a, you know, flaccid penis. And then as we relax, we basically get blood flow into the penis and the penis grows. And then what happens is, it's really interesting, is we activate the sympathetic nervous system, we get these one-way valves that then close off. So right now we kind of have free flow of blood into and out of the penis.

And then once we basically like get very erect and the sympathetic nervous system activates, then we sort of get the blood flow that sort of stays trapped in here, which is how the penis becomes erect. So this is basically a combination of these two systems. And if we look at the sexual act, what we find, first of all, is let's say that pleasure or stimulation is on the x-axis. And then what we can sort of notice is that, like, let's say that this is the y-axis is threshold to orgasm. So basically, like, let's say that this is our baseline threshold to orgasm. So when I start to have sex, I'm increasing my pleasure or my stimulation. And once I hit this critical point, once I go past this, this is the point of orgasm.

And so we know that this can be modified. Okay. So, for example, if I haven't had sex, in a while. Then what happens is my threshold to orgasm decreases. So then what happens is like it doesn't take as much sexual activity to meet this crossing point. And so it is easier for me to orgasm faster. We also know, for example, that if you are on an SSRI medication, that this interferes with your ability to orgasm. And so this actually raises the threshold. So sometimes what happens is like, will even use SSRIs, sometimes in my patients who suffer from premature ejaculation, we'll kind of get like two birds with one stone by increasing the threshold needed to orgasm. Now, the really interesting thing about this is that if you look at sort of the area under the

curve, okay, so now we're going to do the calculus of orgasm. What we see is that there's a certain area under the curve, and this is the total pleasure that is extracted from the sexual act. So if you basically, you know, reach orgasm very quickly, it can be very intense and there's a lot of pleasure. And then this orgasm is generally speaking roughly the same. It's not always. But generally speaking, if we haven't had sex for a long time, the faster you achieve orgasm, the shorter the orgasm is. And so if you kind of look at the total pleasure we experience, it's like this much.

Okay. And if we also look at the intensity of the stimulation, we only need, you know, let's say a mild degree. of stimulation to achieve orgasm. So this is where a lot of drugs come in, like alcohol or marijuana. What these do, or these are CNS depressants. And what this means is that they basically slow the activity of neurons in our brain. THC also has other effects because it activates the endocannabinoid receptors, which sort of enhance pleasure and sensation.

This is also called the anandamide receptor when it was discovered. And Anan means bliss in Sanskrit. So basically what we're doing is we're, activating the parasympathetic nervous system. So when we do that, we are sort of increasing our threshold to orgasm. So what this means when we use drugs is that since our parasympathetic nervous system is now active, we need a higher degree of stimulation to achieve orgasm. But what this also means is that if we really look at it, now we are able to experience more sexual pleasure because the sexual act doesn't end quickly, it actually becomes longer. So if you look at some people who drink alcohol and use

marijuana, oftentimes like the median time to orgasm is actually longer than without it. And sometimes what happens is that we raise the threshold so much that we kind of like fall off the curve. We're all the way up here and then we can't ever actually achieve orgasm because this is the most, this is kind of where our stimulation kind of maxes out, right? So sometimes what happens is people will go so far with their substance use that they can't perform a sexual act. But if you really look at it, like part of the reason that people really like to have sex on drugs is because what you're doing is you're increasing the area of the curve. And the area of the curve underneath the curve is actually the total amount of pleasure that you experience. Okay. So this is basically like a heads-up,

kind of like extrapolated version of understanding how sexual pleasure works. And this is also where we start to see some aspects of fetishism kind of start to play in. Because if you look at fetishism, basically what we're doing is here's our curve. So I'm going to kind of clean this up a little bit. Okay. So here's our baseline threshold to orgasm. So if you look at people who are into fetishes or things that are erogenous zones that are not like climax oriented. So these are things like, you know, for some people, it's like playing with a different part of your body, like earlobes or feet or whatever, okay? So if we kind of look at this, what happens is these erogenous zones and some degree of fetishism allow us to move along this curve without achieving this critical orgasm.

Right. So if someone is into like, let's say BDSM, what this allows is some amount of activity over here that's never going to reach orgasm, right? Because you don't have direct genital stimulation. This, by the way, boys and girls is also foreplay. Okay. So this is a really, really important. If you all want to understand why foreplay is important for sex. So what happens is as you increase foreplay, right, we're not stimulating the genitals, like, directly. So we're kind of like staying low on this curve. And then what happens is once we start to add genital stimulation, then we can achieve orgasm quickly, but then this kind of like spikes up. So the reason that we want to do foreplay or people enjoy engaging in fetishistic behavior is because

this is kind of what the curve looks like, right? And our threshold to orgasm, even when we have some things like BDSM, is even a little bit different because there's like other kinds of stimuli, like actual pain, that can raise this limit. So then what we're basically doing is if we raise the limit through some of these fetishes, then it allows us to achieve a peak. Whereas if we get just direct like genital stimulation, like masturbation is a good example of this. So masturbation is basically like this, where this is the area under the curve. Right. So you have a quick masturbation session and then you're kind of done. It's not as fun as having a lot of foreplay and flirtation and all this like other stuff going on with the sexual act. The total amount of

pleasure extracted, which you could kind of say that this stuff over here is basically your dopamine release. That's one way to think about it. Right. So we're extracting so much more pleasure. And so this is where we get to gooning because gooning is about edging, right? So what we're trying to do with gooning is we're trying to enhance. We're min-maxing our sexual inputs. So these people will have like goon caves where they have multiple monitors and they have certain incense and we're like doing all of this like ritualistic stuff. So if this is our threshold to orgasm, what we basically are doing when we goon is that

we're sort of like increasing this stuff, right? So we're increasing a lot of intensity of stimulation without achieving orgasm. Right. And then gooners will get over here and we'll. edge, but we won't reach the threshold of orgasm, so we'll slow things down a little bit, and then we'll edge again. And then something interesting happens. As you get close to orgasm, and you don't achieve it, other circuits start to kick in. So if you look at sort of the way we've evolved to have sex, basically the average sexual act is around seven minutes, okay? Three to seven

minutes actually for human being. So it's very, very short. And if it doesn't happen a couple of times, what it appears to do, and I have no studies to cite this, is it raises the threshold of orgasm. So then what we're kind of doing with gooning is we're kind of like, you know, we're edging a little bit, we're edging a little bit, and then we can go over here and then we end up achieving orgasm. And if you sort of look at this, what we've done is we really enhance the area under the curve. There's a lot of MinMax stimulus. And so what we're really trying to do is extract as much pleasure as we can outside of our body. Now, y'all may wonder, okay, Dr. K, is this good or is this bad? And honestly, who the hell knows? Right. So this is what's going on on the internet

nowadays, is that we have all of these new things happening. People are trying to figure out essentially how to activate different parts of their brain. They're figuring out how to activate different parts of their body. We're basically like a bunch of mice that are like pushing the cocaine lever to like get cocaine. And we're trying to figure out in this environment, in this cage, what can I do to maximize my, like, you know, my pleasure? And so I don't know, right? Because there aren't any studies. There isn't a single study on gooning that I was able to find. I looked at a lot of studies on obsessive, like sexual behavior, and that can be damaging in some ways. But here's the basic problem that I see. So generally speaking, our body, our brain, our minds are designed to function

in a particular way. So this biological system is designed to achieve an evolutionary goal. And everything within us is designed to achieve that goal. So for example, we love high fat, high sugar foods. We even love umami and those kinds of flavors. And why is that? What is the advantage of liking high fat and high sugar foods? It's because for the majority of evolution, we had low, calorically dense foods and we wanted to gravitate towards like these foods that increase our survival. Now, when we as a society take this principle and we make something like at Twinkie, which is highly processed with a bunch of sugar and a bunch of fat, and we start eating it, what does it do?

It hurts us, right? Leads to obesity, leads to arthritis, leads to mental health issues, causes all kinds of problems. So generally speaking, when we exploit our body by finding particular systems and hyperactivating them, it usually does not end well. This is also what platforms are doing with the internet. So if we look at video game addiction, video game designers that are intention, that are intentionally trying to addict people are doing this. They're looking at different functions like,

oh, you have a sense of identity and you want to feel proud of yourself. So we're going to give you this artificially difficult task. I'm playing the Eldon Ring DLC. And once you achieve that, once you beat that task, you will feel like you have accomplished something. But you can sink 5,000 hours in a video game, accomplish nothing, and have nothing to show for it at the end. And I think Gooning is just the next version of this. So in the past, we first unlocked food, right? So we learned how to exploit the food circuitry. Then we learn how to exploit the identity circuitry, some of the video game circuitry.

And now we're learning this new exploit for our dopaminergic and sexual pleasure circuitry. And I have a couple concerns about this. Because if you maximize your sexual pleasure on your own in a goon cave, what does that mean for the rest of life. Well, this means that you don't need someone else for sexual pleasure, right? And this is the final screw you from the in-cell, which is like, I'm in, I don't, I can't have relationships. I don't want relationships. I'm just going to be by myself. And I honestly kind of get where they're coming from, right? Because if you rely on other human beings to provide something for you and they don't provide it for you, then you need to learn how to be independent. Screw them. Go live your own life. At the same time,

the moment that we start getting our needs met by ourselves, it disincentivizes us to connect with other human beings. The problem with a lot of the coping mechanisms that we have today is that they work incredibly well. They remove the need to go out and fulfill this need in a more natural way. Right. So the whole problem with the Twinkie is that it kills my hunger. It makes me feel satisfied.

So then I will never go eat other kinds of healthy food. And this is what really worries me about gooning. I'm worried that it is going to reinforce loneliness because the drive to procreate fundamentally attracts us to other human beings. And when we remove that drive, then I don't know what's going to happen to the loneliness epidemic once gooning becomes a big thing. There are other problems too because it's not just that gooning allows you to be independent. It may actually interfere with your ability to have a sexual relationship. So this we actually have some data for, not exactly gooning, but a lot of masturbatory behavior, a lot of like, you know, intensive pornography use. There's this concept of a supernormal stimulus, which is that like a pornography basically is like way more than real life, right?

The body parts are bigger. Everything is wetter. Everything is louder. Everything is more colorful. Everything is in 4K. And real life isn't like that. And so if you get, if your body gets trained to a certain kind of sexual pleasure, conditioned, then it is going to be hard for you to, like, engage in relationships. And I've worked with

people who have been compulsive masturbators, or not even compulsive masturbators, even daily masturbation use from, like, the age of, you know, 13 or 14 until the age of 26. And then these people are not, these are men, they're not able to achieve an orgasm through something like vaginal intercourse, because their body has been conditioned to a particular kind of stimulus, your death grip, that doesn't allow you to achieve orgasm. So I'm really concerned that gooning is going to make all of this stuff worse, right? I don't really know that for sure, but I think we can sort of extrapolate and make predictions. I know this is a little bit weird of a video that we've made, but I really think it is important.

I know it's kind of like, gooner, gooner, gooner. Like, I know it's kind of me-ish, and I know we kind of joke about it. And I do think it's like all in good fun, but I want you all to sincerely be careful and recognize that the Internet is rapidly progressing. and people are figuring out how to activate parts of your brain and your body, but that doesn't necessarily make it good, right? So it may be enjoyable, but that doesn't make it healthy. So be careful, y'all go goooners and don't goon too much.

Otherwise, you're going to end up looking like this. Gooner! Gooner! Gooner! Today, we're going to talk about gooning. Okay, let's try that again. Gooner! Gooner!