Your Brain on Facebook : Bigger Social Networks Expand the Size of Neural Networks
A recent study showed that certain brain areas expand in people who have greater numbers of friends on Facebook . This was welcome news for online social network addicts, particularly teenagers : "Mom, I'm not just on Facebook ; I'm doing my temporal lobe calisthenics."There was a problem, though. The study, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B , was unable to resolve the question of whether "friending" plumps up the brain areas or whether people with a type of robustness in brain physiology are just natural social butterflies. "Our own previous study on Facebook could only show correlation between social network size and the brain , but we could not determine the direction of causation between social brain regions and social network size," notes Ryota Kanai of University College London, one of the researchers on the...