Friends on the Brain Posted by Adam Benforado on October 27,
2011 Have a lot of friends on Facebook? Think that makes you
special? Well, researchers at University College London suggest
that you might just be right. According to a new study published
in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Facebook users with the
largest number of pals had greater brain density in areas of the
brain associated with social perception and associative memory.
For anyone who has been following the debate over whether
technology has been changing our brains, it’s worth a read,
although the research doesn’t answer the question of whether the
brain differences in the sample were an effect or a cause of
individuals having more online friends. An abstract of the paper
appears below: The increasing ubiquity of web-based social
networking services is a striking feature of modern human
society. The degree to which individuals participate in these
networks varies substantially for reasons that are unclear.
Here, we show a biological basis