Does
Facebook alter the brain? That's the question which flows from an unusual
investigation into the online social network used by 800 million people.
Volunteers placed in a 3-D scanner had bigger,
denser structures in three areas of the brain if they had a big list of
Facebook friends compared to counterparts who had few online friends,
scientists found.
The three locations are all linked with the
power to socialise.
The superior temporal sulcus and middle
temporal gyrus, "are associated with social perception such as perceiving
other people's gaze or social cues from facial expressions", said
University College London researcher Ryota Kanai.
The third area, the entorhinal complex,
"might be associated with memory for faces and names", he said.
Two years ago, Oxford University
neuroscientist Susan Greenfield unleashed a storm about online networking and
its impact on the young.
"The mid-21st century mind might almost
be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism,
inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity," Greenfield warned
in a speech to Britain's House of Lords.
Lead investigator Geraint Rees, a UCL
professor of neuroscience, said the new study opened up key questions touching
on this controversy.
Among them: whether the size of the
socialising area of the brain leads one to create more friends -- and whether
this area is changed by online social networks... or not at all. Only further
work would resolve this cause-or-effect riddle, he said.
The study appears on Wednesday in the journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society B, published by Britain's de-facto academy of
sciences.
Rees's team enrolled 125 students, 46 of them
men, whose average age was 23.
Their Facebook friends varied in number from
just several to nearly 1,000. Averaged out, this meant around 300 friends per
volunteer.
These results were then checked, to monitor
for any bias, in a separate sample of 40 volunteers.
In a third experiment, the scientists looked
more closely at a sub-sample of 65 of volunteers to see whether there was a
link between the online world and real world in brain structure.
In addition to undergoing brain scan, this
group also filled out a questionnaire about their friends in the real world.
Matching the tally of real-world friendships
with that of online friendships, the scientists found only one correlation in
brain matter.
This was in an area called the bilateral
amygdala, which is believed to process and store memories of emotional events.
There was no such association in the three
brain areas -- the superior temporal sulcus, middle temporal gyrus or
entorhinal complex -- that had been highlighted in the first experiment.
Rees said this was curious. It could mean that
different areas of the brain are used for different forms of socialising.
Previous research has established that the
brain is a flexible organ.
If someone learns a particular motor skill --
for example, if they learn to juggle -- then the grey matter in the motor
cortex, which controls muscles, becomes thicker.
But bigger does not necessarily mean better,
said Rees.
"There are also examples of the other way
around, where more grey matter is associated with more distractibility, in
trying to concentrate on a particular task.
"So we don't know yet the exact
relationship, whether more (grey matter with online networking) is good or not,
and we don't know yet the exact cellular constituents, the exact type of nerve
cell and what exactly is happening. That's really for future research."
AFP
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