You know the old saying: The bigger your Facebook friend network, the larger the volume of grey matter in your brain's right superior temporal sulcus, left middle temporal gyrus and entorhinal cortex. OK, maybe you don't know that.
A new study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences found a link between the amount of friends a person has on Facebook and the size of certain brain regions known to have social implications.
The brain regions included those affecting the creation of memories of faces and names, and those responsible for recognizing social cues, such as body language.
Different regions were targeted in the study when researchers compared brain sizes, suggesting people could be using different socials skills online then offline.
After taking brain scans of 125 college students, the scientists compared their Facebook friends to their real-life friends.
Researchers from University College London found the students with more Facebook friends had certain brain regions that were larger than those with few Facebook friends.
Those regions were the superior temporal sulcus and middle temporal gyrus, which interpret basic social signals and the entorhinal cortex, which matches names and faces.
"Our findings demonstrate that the size of an individual's online social network is closely linked to focal brain structure implicated in social cognition," the researchers said in the study.
However, researchers said they did not have an answer to the chicken-or-the-egg question: whether having more Facebook friends increased the size of those brain regions, or those regions increased the likelihood of having a larger online social network.
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