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Don't have many Facebook friends? Blame it on your brain


Do you ever look at people on Facebook and wonder why they have so many—or so few—friends? It turns out that the number of friends you list online may be linked to your brain structure. New research in Proc B has found that the amount of grey matter in specific areas of our brain is correlated to the number of friends we have on Facebook, even though there's no correlation with real-world social network size.

Researchers already knew that the size of our real-life social network is related to amygdala size, presumably because the volume of this area of the brain limits the amount of social information we can process; those with large amygdalae tend to have larger groups of friends and acquaintances than those with smaller amygdalae. Since Facebook and other social networks have become so popular, researchers have begun to wonder whether this relationship holds true for online networks as well, or whether other regions of the brain are more closely correlated to the number of friends we have online.

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