Facebook’s latest antics are always a treat to hear about, but this is an entirely different bag of tricks. According to some scientists from the UK, individuals who have more friends on the social networking site also lean towards larger brain size in certain areas, especially when compared with their less sociable peers.
Of course, this doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get smarter by procrastinating as much as possible (tempting as it is!), as “correlation doesn’t imply causation”—or, in Earth language, more social people are not necessarily smarter because they are social. A lead researcher at University College London recently made the point that the larger brain areas simply may be those designated to social networking, which would probably make a lot more sense. We don’t notice ourselves getting smarter from chatting (or stalking…shhh!) on Facebook, but we’ll keep our fingers crossed.
Whether or not social networking does boost your brain power, whether only Facebook or other sites have this effect, and how to finally get the hang of the new layout—these are all questions left up for debate. As always, there are a variety of factors influencing the topic, so this is something that will likely be up for debate for some time…until the next home page update.