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Researchers found less grey matter inside the brain of men who watched more sexually explicit contents, according to a new study.

However it was not determined if porn actually caused the brain to shrink. Authors called for an additional study on the topic. 

"Future studies should investigate the effects of pornography longitudinally or expose naive participants to pornography and investigate the causal effects over time," said researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, in the press release.

Researchers considered around 64 men, aged 21-45 years "with a broad range of pornography consumption."

Subjects were not told that the research was about monitoring brains on porn. Instead that were told that the study was "a scientific study including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measurements."

Participants of the study were then asked to fill out a questionnaire in which they had to provide information like how much porn they watched. Their responses averaged a little more than four hours per week, according to the press release. 

Later their brains were scanned with MRI technology while they were shown sexually explicit images from porn websites, including no-sexual images of people exercising.

"Our findings indicated that gray matter volume of the right caudate of the striatum is smaller with higher pornography use," said study's authors according to ABC.net.au. 

Researchers also observed that when sexually explicit materials were shown, their MRIs showed diminished function in a part of brain that processes motivation. 

"Individuals with lower striatum volume may need more external stimulation to experience pleasure and might therefore experience pornography consumption as more rewarding, which may in turn lead to" more porn watching, write the authors, concluding that more study is needed.

"Basically everything that people do very frequently can shape their brain structure and function," Simone Kühn, the study's lead author from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, told Reuters.

The study is published in the  JAMA Psychiatry.