Are You A Social Butterfly? It Can Change Your Brain For Good

Don’t scold people or call them ‘dumb’ the next time you fail to drag them off the social sites. Chances are they have more of those ‘little grey cells’ than Hercule Poirot could ever hope to possess. According to a new study, if you have more friends than most, certain parts of your brain tend to get bigger and more grey matter could be growing there.

According to researchers from the University of Oxford, people with bigger social networks often have a different brain pattern, LiveScience reported. For one, there is increased connectivity between the brain regions and such people may have more grey matter in certain brain parts like the temporal parietal junction, the anterior cingulate cortex and the rostral prefrontal cortex. Interestingly, these are part of a network involved in mentalisation – the ability to attribute mental states, thoughts and beliefs to another.

Does it mean these parts of the brain are growing because they have gone into overdrive, ‘trying’ to cope with ‘increased’ social activities? We know it sounds like gym – the more the exercise, the better the muscle power.

But then, it makes sense if you take into account a previous experiment with macaque monkeys. It has been discovered that social-group size causes difference in their brain size and the brain parts connected to face processing and predicting others’ intentions happen to be bigger in animals that are living in large social groups.

So what’s preventing a similar thing from happening to the human brain? It’s quite plausible, although scientists are not yet sure. To investigate the matter, MaryAnn Noonan from the University of Oxford and her colleagues at McGill University (Canada) got 18 participants for a structural brain-imaging study after determining the amount of socialising they did last month. And the result was staggering. As with the monkeys, some brain areas were enlarged and better connected in humans with larger social networks.

According to LiveScience, the researchers also tested if the size of a person’s social network was linked to changes in white-matter pathways, the nerve fibres that connect different brain regions. Again, the result was positive. The white-matter tracts were better connected in people with bigger social networks.

So what’s the bottom line here? Pretty simple, according to Noonan. “If you’re spending a lot of time in social environments using social skills and your brain’s changing, maybe you’re not learning to juggle in your free time or becoming proficient at the piano,” she said. “The brain is just changing and optimising to reflect your needs, and if that is thriving within a complex social environment, that is what your brain is reflecting.”