The Effect of Social Networking on Your Brain

Social networking can modify your brain, not only yout social life.

A study published by the British Biological Sciences Society proves that there is a close connection between the number of Facebook friends and the size of certain parts of the human brain, according to BBC.

It’s not really clear yet if using social networks could affect someones intelligence or people with a distinct brain structure are better at making friends. And this is because the same  parts of the human brain have multiple function like social interaction and memory or could be responsible for developing autism.

 

The study was published in the RoYal Society B: Biological Sciences Journal and the scientist studied tridimensional brain images of 125 students from London. They counted the number of Facebook friends of each student but also the number of real life friends. Using this method, the scientists found a close connection between the number of Facebook friends and the quantity of grey matter from certain parts of the brain.

We can not deny that the internet is everywhere, neither the impact that it has on our lives, but we know too little about the effect that it has on our brain, which is a superficial organ that can change with time said one of the scientists.

The study also proved that the number of Facebook friends that the user is still in contact with is proportional with the number of friends from his real life.

Volunteers were asked things related to the number of contacts in their telephone address book , the numbers of high school friends they still keep in touch with, how many friends would they invite to a party if they had one, and the number of Facebook friends. Their answers led to an estimate about the size of their social circle. Professor Geraint Rees of UCL, who led the research, says it is still too early to understand the exact impact of social networking on the human brain. “Our study will help us begin to understand how our interactions with the world are mediated through social networks. This will allow us to begin to ask intelligent questions about the relationship between Internet and human brain”, he said.

Facebook, the most popular social networking site in the world has more than 800 million active users worldwide. The site allows people to interact with groups of friends ranging in size from a few people to several thousand.

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