The next time your parents tell you to, “Get off Facebook!” at the dinner table, you will have a more neuroscientifically plausible response, “I’m working on expanding the amount of grey matter in my right entorhinal cortex!” … or not?
Facebook has become the epicenter of social networking. With more than 800 million active users worldwide, “friending” an old classmate from preschool and swapping pictures seems quicker, easier, and more interactive than planning out a reunion only to find yourself once again going your separate ways at the end of the night.
Reuters has published a bold new article titled, “More Facebook friends linked to bigger brain areas.” The article goes on to propose that the number of online friends a person has may affect the size of certain regions of the brain. The focus of this article is whether the internet will change the structure of the human brain over time. Ryota Kanai, a researcher from the University College London, and colleagues used MRI to examine the brains of students. In their study they used 125 students who were active Facebook users. They went on to cross – check their data with 40 other students later on. In their research they found that the amount of friends a person had on Facebook strongly suggested a connection with the grey matter of four regions in the brain: the amygdala, the right superior temporal sulcus, the right entorhinal cortex, and the left middle temporal gyrus.
However, they also found that the thickness of the grey matter when it came to the amygdala was also related to “real – world” friends. Although, the other three brain regions were linked to the “online” friendships. Typically the students in their research varied in the number of friends each one had from roughly 300 to upwards of 1,000.
There is still more research to be done in relation to social networking and the brain and with all of this research it is still not clear whether a person is “hard – wired” to be more social. Heidi Johansen Berg, a researcher not involved in the study from the University of Oxford, said, “If you got yourself 100 new Facebook friends today then your brain would not be bigger tomorrow.”
Despite the controversy and the on-going dilemma of the goodness or evil of modern – day technology, it is good to know that perhaps we can begin to be a little more “guilt – free” while expanding our friend circles on Facebook!
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/19/uk-science-facebook-idUSLNE79I02020111019