The size of some parts of the brain correlate to how many friends people have on Facebook, researchers from University College London reported in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The brain areas that appear to have more gray matter include the amygdala, the right superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right entorhinal cortex. The authors also informed that those with more Facebook friends tend to have more ‘real world’ friends.

What they have identified, the authors emphasize, is a correlation, and not a cause. That is, from their findings one cannot say whether having more friends in Facebook results in more gray matter in those regions of the brain, or whether some of us are hardwired to have a greater number of friends.

Facebook, a social networking website, has over 800 million active users globally. There are nearly 30 million just in the UK. It had over 138.9 million unique U.S. visitors in the month May 2011 in the USA alone.

Some users have just a few friends while others have thousands. It is not clear, the researchers explain, whether this variation correlates with how many ‘real world’ social networks people have – but there is a tendency for those with many online friends to have a wider real world social network too.

Professor Geraint Rees, at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, 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 team examined imaging scans of 125 university students; all of them used Facebook. They compared how big their network of friends were, both on the online social networking site and in the real world. They then replicated their findings with another 40 students.

They found a close association between how many Facebook friends people had and the amount of brain tissue where processing is done (gray matter) in some regions of the brain.

The authors say another recent study had found a correlation between gray matter volume in the amygdala and the number of real world friends people had. This new study demonstrates that it also appears to be the case for those with a large number of friends online.

Amyg
Location of the Amygdala

The regions in the brain are:

  • The amygdala – a part of the brain associated with processing memory and emotional responses.
  • The right superior temporal sulcus – helps us perceive a moving object as biological. Structural defects have been detected in children with an ASD (autism spectrum disorder).
  • The left middle temporal gyrus – plays a role in memory and navigation, including navigation through social networks.
  • The right entorhinal cortex – this area is involved in the perception of social cues. The area becomes active when other people gaze at us.

The last three regions above were correlated with more online friends, but not with real-world ones.

First author of the study, Dr Ryota Kanai, said:

“We have found some interesting brain regions that seem to link to the number of friends we have – both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’. 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 authors also compared the size of people’s online and real world networks. Studies had looked at this before, but they were very small ones.

The participants were asked questions regarding how often they got a text message inviting them to a celebration, how many friends they had in their phonebook, how many old school/college friends they could have a friendly chat with that day.

Professor Rees said:

“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.”

Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust, Dr John Williams, , made the following comment on the study:

“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 and can change over time. 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.”

Written by Christian Nordqvist