Do the most popular people on Facebook have denser brains?

For some people, Facebook can be a way to show how popular they are – but do people with lots of Facebook friends actually have different brains? Recent research from University College London seems to suggest they do…

When Facebook first poked its way on to the internet, there was a scramble from early adopters to gather as many ‘friends’ as possible, and there was more than a hint of competitiveness about showing how popular you were in the social media world.

A recent study, published by the Royal Society, examined the MRIs of 165 adults who reported the number of Facebook friends they have. It hypothesised that the way people use online social networks might be reflected in the structure of their brains – specifically that Facebook users with the most online ‘friends’ had more grey matter in the parts of the brain linked to social skills – particularly the ‘focal regions’.

The report says:

“…the brain regions we identified were specifically associated with online social network size, whereas the grey matter density of the amygdala was correlated both with online and real-world social network sizes. Taken together, 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 study doesn’t come to any conclusions on whether this is down to nature or nurture – either your brain structure may mean you’re predisposed to have more friends than others, or the relationship between your brain structure and the number of your Facebook friends changes over time.

So if you don’t have many online friends, don’t worry about being unpopular – it could all be down to the structure of your brain.

Find out more about the study here >

Do you care about how many Facebook friends you have? What do you think of the study? Let us know below.