Is Facebook Making Our Brains Bigger?
Scientists are obsessed with studying the impact of Facebook on our brains. Usually the news is bad. But a new study says having more Facebook friends might be make your brain bigger.
Studying 125 undergraduates, scientists at University College London found a "direct link between number of friends on Facebook and size of certain brain regions," according to Reuters. People with more friends on Facebook had more grey matter in four areas associated with memory, emotional response and social interaction.
Obviously, correlation does not equal causation, so it could be that people with a lot of Facebook friends are inborn with some awful brain mutuation that drives them to friend hundreds of people they barely know. Or, there could be an unknown third factor that is influencing both brain size and the number of Facebook friends people have. Please let it be this.
Could you imagine the future we're headed to, if Facebook physically shapes our brain? 2042: Everyone's walking around with special blue-and-white Facebook-branded helmets to keep their swollen, quivering amygdala's from jumping out of their skull and literally connecting with other peoples'; the handshake has been replaced by a mutual-poke; parenting consists of pressing a "Like" button on your kid's forehead when they do something good.
[Image via Getty]