Scientists claim Facebook friend list is associated with brain structure

Scientists claim Facebook friend list is associated with brain structure

After a thorough research on brain structure and functions, the neuroscientists from University College London have found a direct link between the number of friends of a person on Facebook and the size of certain brain regions.

The researchers believe that using online social networks might change our brains and the people with large number of Facebook friends have different brains than those of with fewer friends on the social networking site.

The neuroscientists say that four brain areas involved are known to play a role in memory, emotional responses and social interactions. They found a strong connection between the number of Facebook friends and the amount of grey matter in the three regions, the right superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right entorhinal cortex.

Grey matter is a brain tissue layer where mental processing occurs. The researchers say that the people with large number of friends have a denser grey matter in these three regions of the brain linked to the social skills. The findings propose that these brain regions are changed either due to the social networking or the people with these kind of brains show different behaviour on websites like Facebook.

Speaking about the findings, Prof. Geraint Rees of University College London said, “Social networks are ubiquitous in human society. A key question for debate in contemporary societies with online social networks is do people use them in the same way or are they enabling a completely different type of communication and interaction that was never before possible?”

The neuroscientist added, “People get worried about whether that is in some way affecting or changing our brains or the ways we interact with the world.”

However, it is still a question that some particular parts of the brain grow larger having a huge number of Facebook friends or whether some people are simply pre-disposed to have more friends.

One of the researchers involved in the study, Ryota Kanai of University College London (UCL) stated, “The exciting question now is whether these structures change over time – this will help us answer the question of whether the Internet is changing our brains.”

The researchers of University London College used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study the brains of 125 university students, who were the active users of Facebook, and cross-checked their findings in a further group of 40 students. They also found that the thickness of grey matter was also connected to the number of friends in real world.

Posted by Zeeshan Gohar on Oct 20 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry