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.”
