The year was 2008 and I was having a splendid time at Nekede Federal Polytechnic, Owerri Imo State, Nigeria. I was a top performer in the Department of Public Administration with a first semester GPA of 3.52 and a second semester GPA of 3.50, all on a 4.00 scale. The secret was simple, attend conferences regularly, rest well and read every day. It was clear that with more effort, I would graduate with distinction, which could lead to automatic employment as a professor at the Polytechnic.
In my first semester of senior year, I met a student named Jane. Before that, my relationship with the students was platonic. My close friends were my reading partners. Jane and I’s relationship gradually turned sexual. Instead of going home to rest after the day’s lectures, I went straight to Jane’s hostel. I’ll be home late, too weak to read.
My nightly reading also suffered, because I was busy making calls at midnight and sleeping the rest of the time. I spent most of my time discussing and visiting Jane. She got so bad that I couldn’t concentrate in class. I kept remembering our entire sexual escapade as the lectures continued. Instead of reading for the proposed two hours, I’ll spend an hour and thirty minutes going over everything we did and just thirty minutes for skeleton reading. Concentration, reading, retention and recall became a big problem.
I met my Waterloo when Jane told me she was pregnant. Immediately, my focus shifted from academics to how to deal with the child. We did everything we could to get rid of the baby, from drinking hot drinks to different concoctions, all to no avail. She kept crying around me, forcing me to get money for an abortion.
I got confused and lost total control of my studies. I couldn’t sleep at night because different thoughts engulfed my mind. Will I be a murderer? What if she died in the abortion process? These and many more questions occupied my head. At one point, I started having nightmares. I kept seeing dead bodies. So graduating with Distinction was the least of my preference scale.
However, we did see an abortionist and used my school fees to pay for her service. Painfully, I had peace. A few weeks later, I wrote my HND1 exams for the first semester. The result was published a month later and it became clear that it was impossible to graduate with distinction. My GPA was 3.27. I needed at least 3.71 to get to the top level. Everyone was disappointed, including my reading partners.
I came back for my second semester determined to be the best regardless of the outcome of my last semester. I forgot my past and never remembered my sexual relationship with Jane. One night Jane invited me over to her house to have sex; I refused to go. She kept drawing me in, but I stood my ground. I have decided never to have sex with anyone. She got mad and stopped talking to me, but I concentrated on my studies. Jane begged and cried for my return, but I kept running. She started making all kinds of negative comments about me, despite that I stood my ground. I read twice a day, once immediately after the day’s lectures and once in the early hours of the morning.
After our second semester exam, I nervously returned home to Port Harcourt. A few weeks later, my friend Chukwudike called me. He said, “George, our results are out; you are a record breaker. Your GPA is 3.75, the Department Head and most professors want to know who Anyaehie George is.” I later graduated second best in the department (distinction level).
Lesson
According to information drawn from a Canadian Community Health Survey, 43% of adolescents aged 15-19 years reported that they had had sexual intercourse at least once. A survey conducted by the University of New Hampshire indicated that 42% of Internet users between the ages of 10 and 17 said they had viewed pornography online in the past year.
Pornography and premarital has become a serious problem today because sexual and pornographic materials are easily accessible. Street sex vendors are everywhere in the neighborhood; we even have mobile or internet sex. Pornographic materials are just a click away. Porn movie actors are now recognized as celebrities, they are called “porn stars”.
Premarital sex and pornography are one of the cardinal causes of academic failure. How? A vital neurotransmitter in the brain is dopamine. It has many important functions; It fulfills functions such as voluntary movement, the experience of pleasure, motivation, reward, punishment and learning. Sex and porn target the dopaminergic system to release large amounts of dopamine, resulting in experiencing a “high”, often leading to addiction. When released, dopamine strengthens and reinforces the new connections that are being made in the brain while doing an activity. This, in turn, acts to encourage the individual to repeat the activity again so that he can feel that pleasure once again. And when the person refuses to repeat the activity, depression, dissatisfaction and anger are generated.
As sexual or nude images are shown physically or on screen, arousal occurs and the dopaminergic system is activated much like drugs like cocaine would. The newly formed connections in the brain when having sex or viewing pornographic images are greatly enhanced by the massive amounts of dopamine that are released. Instead of moving into short-term memory, where these images can be forgotten after the screen turns off, the dopamine booster ensures that they move into long-term memory stores where they can get stuck in replay mode on the person’s mind. The troubling fact about this is that the more something is remembered, the more it solidifies in the brain. That’s why you can’t easily forget sexual escapades. You can narrate how the adventure began, how it progressed and how it ended.
What is alarming about this information is that the brain acts as a complete entity; its plasticity is global. Change in one area affects other regions. Views of sex and porn can literally rewire general neural connections. When the brain rewires itself to focus on sex or pornography, reading, understanding, and remembering become difficult because the memory has long been occupied with sexual or pornographic images or scenes.
There’s nothing as dangerous as “let me just try this once” because dopamine will make you addicted. Addiction starts from an encounter or scene. It progresses from soft porn of reading text describing sexual feelings and soft graphic images to hard porn of graphic images of people having sex and graduates to real sex. Over time, the images become imprinted in the mind of the user, leading to addiction to sex and pornography.
Research has shown that students who have sex perform less well than those who don’t. Focusing on one area leads to loss of focus on another area. You can’t compare a married student to a single student; the bachelor will be more focused. That is why some schools do not admit married students. It is also important to note that many of the world’s greatest inventors refused to have sex or to marry. Among them are the Wright brothers, George Washington Carver, Nikola Tesla, Pablo de Tarso.