Are you one of those people that spend countless hours communicating to family and friends on Facebook? Did you know that you may be adding grey matter to your brain? In essence this is signifies greater density to that part of the brain that’s linked to social skills.
Some may even say that people with larger areas of the brain for social skills may have a higher than average Facebook count.
Are You Confused Yet?
Confused? This is based on research from the University College London who crunching the numbers after finding a connection between brain structure and actual Facebook activity.
This study (published by the Royal Society B) was taken from MRIs of a select group of 165 adults who were asked to report the number of Facebook friends they have.
Here’s an extract from the result:
“Taken together, our findings show that the number of social contacts declared publicly on a major web-based 
social networking site was strongly associated with the structure of focal regions of the human brain.
Specifically, we found that variation in the number of friends on Facebook strongly and significantly
predicted grey matter volume in left MTG, right STS and right entorhinal cortex.
These findings survived whole-brain correction for multiple comparisons and replicated in an independent sample. Moreover,
we found that the grey matter density of the amygdala, which was previously shown to be linked with
real-world social network size, was also correlated with online social network size”. said study leader
Prof Geraint Rees, director of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL,
whose study was published on Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.”
Image courtesy of Flickr, Patrick Denker
About Desmond Dreckett
I love my job and I'm really passionate about helping businesses with their digital marketing. This industry changes every day, so I suppose it's important to keep my finger on the pulse and be able to react and inform our clients when they do.
Great! thanks for the share!
Arron