The psychological implications of our internet activity has interesting implications on brain size according to new research by scientists at the University College London (UCL) – who have found a direct link between the number of ‘Facebook friends’ a person has and the size of particular brain regions.
The study funded by the Wellcome Trust showed that the more Facebook friends a person has, the more ‘real-world’ friends they are likely to have.
The researchers are keen to stress that they have found a correlation and not a cause, however: in other words, it is not possible from the data to say whether having more Facebook friends makes the regions of the brain larger or whether some people are ‘hardwired’ to have more friends.
Professor Geraint Rees, a Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Research Fellow at UCL, said: “Online social networks are massively influential, yet we understand very little about the impact they have on our brains. This has led to a lot of unsupported speculation that the internet is somehow bad for us.
“Our study will help us begin to understand how our interactions with the world are mediated through social networks. This should allow us to start asking intelligent questions about the relationship between the internet and the brain — scientific questions, not political ones.”
Professor Rees and colleagues at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging studied brain scans of 125 university students — all active Facebook users — and compared them against the size of the students’ network of friends, both online and in the real world. Their findings, which they replicated in a further group of 40 students, are published October 20 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Journal Reference: R. Kanai, B. Bahrami, R. Roylance, G. Rees. Online social network size is reflected in human brain structure. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2011; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2011.1959
Source: The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by Bare Essentials staff) from materials provided by the Wellcome Trust (for further information please visit their site).
