If you have a Facebook account, then you might find this bit of news from the scientists at the University College of London (UCL) exciting. According to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, there is a direct link between the number of online friends you have and the size of your brain. To be more specific, the study points at the four brain areas involved in memory, emotional responses, and social interactions.
The study has also led some to speculate that perhaps using the Internet isn’t as bad as other people claim it to be. As Geraint Rees of UCL says, "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 the Internet is somehow bad for us."
To find out whether or not use of social media does indeed have a positive influence on the brain, researchers used the technology of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to analyze the brains of 125 university students, all of whom were active on Facebook (each student having an average of 300 friends online). Their research revealed a rather significant amount of grey matter (layer of brain tissue that handles mental processing) in the brain’s amygdala.
While the amount of grey matter also seems to be present for the students with a lot of real-world friends, the enlargement of the three other areas of the brain appears to be limited to online friends only.
But before you start adding anonymous friends online, keep in mind that the study does not say that having more online friends makes your brain larger. There is no concrete evidence to support this theory. There is always the possibility that those with larger brains just have the natural inclination to make more friends.
For more studies on Facebook, check this out on FN:
(Photo by Josh Rusell courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons)
