Online Social Media Networking Make for Bigger Brains?
The more Facebook friends you have, the more grey matter you have in certain parts of the brain.
That's what the work published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences is saying. They looked at 125 3D brain scans of university students from London and counted the number of Facebook friends each had. They also assessed the size of their network of real friends.
What they discovered is that there is a correlation on the amount of grey matter in three parts of the brain with how wide a person's online network is.
One part of the brain that is said to be affected is the amygdala. This is the region responsible for memory and emotional responses.
Figure 1: Grey matter volume correlated with quantitative measure of participation in social networks. Areas where the number of friends reported on Facebook correlated significantly with variability in grey matter density across the entire group (n = 125) are shown superimposed on a standard T1-weighted template brain in MNI stereotactic space. Correlated areas are shown at T > 3.0 for visualization purposes.
It is unclear though what is the cause and what is the effect. Does having more brain matter makes a person reach out to more people online or is it the other way around? The study comes out inconclusive on this one.
And before parents push their kids into using the internet more, the study does not clarify any cause or effect issues. There is no concrete basis whether having an online network presence is good or bad for the brain.
The study concludes, "our study was by design cross-sectional and so cannot determine whether the relationship between brain structure and social network participation arises over time through friendship-dependent plasticity in the brain areas involved; or alternatively whether individuals with a specific brain structure are predisposed to acquire more friends than others. The relative contributions of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ therefore remain to be determined..."
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