Can Social Network Sites Increase the Size of Your Brain?

A lot of us older folks bemoan what the computer age is doing to the younger folks. Some of us say that there is too much violence in computer games and that spending most of your time in front of a computer screen takes away the opportunity to get outside and get some exercise. They also say that it takes away a lot of our human interaction by texting and twittering rather than communicating in person.

But we are social animals and the hottest thing on the web today besides porn are the social networks like MySpace and Facebook. In life we may have four or five friends, but on Facebook you can have hundreds. And now researchers say that social networking can actually increase the size of a part of our brain. According to Medical News Today:

"The richer and more varied a person's social network, the bigger their amygdala, a structure deep in the brain that has been linked to size and complexity of social groups in other primate species, said researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital."

The amygdala sits deep within the brain and has two lobes. It is connected to many other sections of the brain and is believed to have many functions related to the way we behave.

By studying the amygdala in primates, researchers have found that the more complex the creature's social interaction, the larger it is. The volume of the amygdala begins to shrink as we get older.

That's why more social associations are formed when we are younger, and that's also why there are more younger people on Facebook and MySpace than us old geezers. The relative size of the amygdala is the same in men as it is in women. The social effect is also the same.

The researchers measured the size of the respondent's social network as well as the complexity. The size difference was the same even when the researchers adjusted for the difference in the subject's brain volume and seemed to be only related to the amygdala and not to other structures in the brain.

But the researchers found that two structures that are directly connected to the amygdala did also show some size variation. The size of the structure was only related to the size and complexity of the social network and not related to other factors like social satisfaction, or life support. So, it seems that it's quantity of social interactions, not quality.

So it looks like being on the social networks seems to make at least one part of your brain get bigger.

Source: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/212516.php