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 lwig 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 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 were actually born in the nether regions of forchan 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 youall 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 and what the Neuroscience of that that is and we'll try to unpack this concept of gooning hey y'all if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we discussed to your life to actually create change check out Dr K's guide to mental health the guide synthesize my years of training as a monk along with years of clinical experience as a psychiatrist to cover common topics like meditation ADHD and Trauma the guides include over 100 additional videos that can be navigated based on your needs or interests or in a more open choose your own Adventure format the guides are now available in the YouTube store below and if they're a little bit outside of your price point you can check out a piece of them with our free resource packs which are also linked below so definitely check them out 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 Nal 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 um 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 a 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 if 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 fairy anti-masturbation was this guy a Swiss doctor named Tso and this is the actual old like medical text okay so this is I guess this was an Project Gutenberg um 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 venial 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 onanist onanist is basically the 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 lead in 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 pulse is small and feeble upon the slightest motion or during sleep the forehead chest and Palms of of the hands are bathed with profuse perspiration in some patients the hands and feet are emitis okay there's also general atne 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 onist 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 is and is embarrassed and is almost as if it as it were ashamed of himself his manner might sometimes pass for timidity we might almost say for innocence but is it is entirely changed when being in the company with a profess onist he no longer feels restrained okay um he constantly experiences a a sensation of sadness and eny 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 are 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 with circles and by the way these are all men right because like back in 1839 we didn't know medically that women could masturbate there's actually some information about the clitorus and stuff like that so that was we were aware of that but it's 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 [ __ ] 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 minmax 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 in 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 vibing we're sleeping so it's one or the other but what happens in 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 in the male and this also includes clitoral um vasod dilation so even like the engorgement of the clitoris is the same thing it's 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 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 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 xaxis and then what we can sort of uh 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 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 we'll 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 their threshold 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 is generally speaking roughly the same it's not always but generally speaking if we haven't had sex for a long time the or 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 we 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 are 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 endoc canabo receptors which sort of enhance pleasure and sensation um these are this is also called the anandamide receptor when we was discovered and anund 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 often times 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 um 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 with without achieving this critical orgasm point right so if someone is a 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 really really important if yall 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 Eng engaging in fetish 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 is even a little bit different because there's like other kinds of stimuli like actual pain that that can raise this limit so then what we 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 uh extracted which you could kind of say that this 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 there we're 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 the way we've evolved to have sex basically the average sexual act is around 7 minutes okay 3 to 7 minutes actually for human beings so it's very very short and if it doesn't happen a couple of times what it appears to do and there's no 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 enhanced 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 cuz 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 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 a Twinkie which is highly processed with a bunch of sugar and a bunch of fat and we start eating it what is 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 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 Elden ring DLC and once you achieve that once you beat that task you will feel like you have accompl accomplish something but you can SN 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 used we first unlocked food right so we learned how to exploit the food circuitry then we learned 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 con 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 your life well this means that you don't need someone else for sexual pleasure right and this is the final screw you from the incel 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 you 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 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 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 [ __ ] or not even compulsive [ __ ] even daily masturbation use from like the age of you know 13 or 14 till 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 I really think it is important I know it's kind of like gooner gooner gooner like I know it's kind of mish and I know we kind of joke about it and I do think it's like all in good fun but I want yall to sincerely be careful and recognize that the internet is 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 gooners and know and and don't go 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 goon gooner [Music]