There’s a link between the number of “Facebook friends” a person has and the size of certain brain regions, as well as their number of real-world friends, scientists have found. But it’s unknown, they say, whether having more Facebook friends makes those brain regions larger, or whether it works the other way around.
The social networking website Facebook, designed to let people stay in touch with networks of friends online, has more than 800 million active users worldwide. Some have only a handful of online friends, others over a thousand. “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,” said researcher Geraint Rees of University College London.
Rees and colleagues studied brain scans of 125 university students who were active Facebook users and compared them to the size of the students’ network of friends, both online and in real life. Their findings, which they replicated in a further group of 40 students, are published Oct. 18 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The investigators reported a strong link between number of Facebook friends and amount of “grey matter”— the brain tissue where mental processing is believed to take place—in several brain areas. One is the amygdala, which is associated with processing memory and emotional responses. Other research has found that there is more grey matter in this area in people with more real-world friends, so the Facebook work showed the same goes for online pals, Rees’ group reported.
The size of three other regions – the right superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right entorhinal cortex – also correlated with online social networks, but not with real-world networks, the study found. The superior temporal sulcus plays a role in our ability to perceive a moving object as biological; structural defects in this region have been identified in some children with autism. The entorhinal cortex, meanwhile, has been linked to memory and navigation – including navigating through online social networks. Finally, the middle temporal gyrus has been shown to activate in response to the gaze of others and so is implicated in perception of social cues.
“The exciting question now is whether these structures change over time,” which should help reveal “whether the Internet is changing our brains,” said Ryota Kanai, one of the researchers.
To learn the relationship between the size of a person’s online network of friends and their real-world network, the researchers asked their volunteers questions such as “How many people would you send a text message to marking a celebratory event (e.g. birthday, new job, etc.)?”, “What is the total number of friends in your phonebook?” and “How many friends have you kept from school and university that you could have a friendly conversation with now?”
“Our findings support the idea that most Facebook users use the site to support their existing social relationships, maintaining or reinforcing these friendships, rather than just creating networks of entirely new, virtual friends,” said Rees.
“We cannot escape the ubiquity of the Internet and its impact on our lives, yet we understand little of its impact on the brain, which we know is plastic [flexible] and can change over time,” said John Williams, head of neuroscience and mental health at the London-based Wellcome Trust, which funded the research. “This new study illustrates how well-designed investigations can help us begin to understand whether or not our brains are evolving as they adapt to the challenges posed by social media.”
The social networking website Facebook, designed to let people stay in touch with networks of friends online, has more than 800 million active users worldwide. Some have only a handful of online friends, others over a thousand. “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,” said researcher Geraint Rees of University College London.
Rees and colleagues studied brain scans of 125 university students who were active Facebook users and compared them to the size of the students’ network of friends, both online and in real life. Their findings, which they replicated in a further group of 40 students, are published Oct. 18 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The investigators reported a strong link between number of Facebook friends and amount of “grey matter”— the brain tissue where mental processing is believed to take place—in several brain areas. One is the amygdala, which is associated with processing memory and emotional responses. Other research has found that there is more grey matter in this area in people with more real-world friends, so the Facebook work showed the same goes for online pals, Rees’ group reported.
The size of three other regions – the right superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right entorhinal cortex – also correlated with online social networks, but not with real-world networks, the study found. The superior temporal sulcus plays a role in our ability to perceive a moving object as biological; structural defects in this region have been identified in some children with autism. The entorhinal cortex, meanwhile, has been linked to memory and navigation – including navigating through online social networks. Finally, the middle temporal gyrus has been shown to activate in response to the gaze of others and so is implicated in perception of social cues.
“The exciting question now is whether these structures change over time,” which should help reveal “whether the Internet is changing our brains,” said Ryota Kanai, one of the researchers.
To learn the relationship between the size of a person’s online network of friends and their real-world network, the researchers asked their volunteers questions such as “How many people would you send a text message to marking a celebratory event (e.g. birthday, new job, etc.)?”, “What is the total number of friends in your phonebook?” and “How many friends have you kept from school and university that you could have a friendly conversation with now?”
“Our findings support the idea that most Facebook users use the site to support their existing social relationships, maintaining or reinforcing these friendships, rather than just creating networks of entirely new, virtual friends,” said Rees.
“We cannot escape the ubiquity of the Internet and its impact on our lives, yet we understand little of its impact on the brain, which we know is plastic [flexible] and can change over time,” said John Williams, head of neuroscience and mental health at the London-based Wellcome Trust, which funded the research. “This new study illustrates how well-designed investigations can help us begin to understand whether or not our brains are evolving as they adapt to the challenges posed by social media.”
