Facebook friends photo gridFLICKR, DAN TAYLOR
Though many users of the social networking site Facebook accumulate hundreds or even thousands of “friends,” many of which they’ve never met, the total is indicative of the number of real-world friends the users have, as well as the size of particular brain structures, according to a study published today (October 18) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“Online social networks are massively influential, yet we understand very little about the impact they have on our brains,” Geraint Rees, a Wellcome Trust Senior Clinical Research Fellow at University College London (UCL), said in a press release. “This has led to a lot of unsupported speculation the internet is somehow bad for us.” So he and his colleagues culled Facebook, which boasts more than 800 ...
