SOCIAL MEDIA : PLEASE PAY ATTENTION

Whether you're on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, What's App or Twitter, the way you
communicate with friends today is changing.
Keeping in touch is no longer about face to face, but instead screen to screen,
highlighted by the fact that more than 1 billion people are using Facebook every day.
Social media has become second nature -- but what impact is this having on our brain?
Reward circuitry
In a recent study, researchers at the UCLA brain mapping center used an fMRI scanner
to image the brains of 32 teenagers as they used a bespoke social media app resembling
Instagram. By watching the activity inside different regions of the brain as the teens
used the app, the team found certain regions became activated by "likes", with the
brain's reward center becoming especially active.
Americans devote more than 10 hours a day to screen time
"When teens learn that their own pictures have supposedly received a lot of likes, they
show significantly greater activation in parts of the brain's reward circuitry," says lead
author Lauren Sherman. "This is the same group of regions responding when we see
pictures of a person we love or when we win money."
The teenagers were shown more than 140 images where 'likes' were believed to from
their peers, but were in fact assigned by the research team.
Scans revealed that the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain's reward circuitry, was
especially active when teens saw a large number of likes on their own photos, which
could inspire them to use social media more often.
Peer influence
As part of the experiment, participants were also shown a range of "neutral" photos
showing things like food and friends, and "risky" photos depicting cigarettes and
alcohol. But the type of image had no impact on the number of "likes" given by the
teens. they were instead more likely to 'like' the more popular photos, regardless of what
they showed. This could lead to both a positive and negative influence from peers
online.
Sherman believes these results could have important implications among this age group.
"Reward circuitry is thought to be particularly sensitive in adolescence," says Sherman,
"It could be explaining, at least in part, why teens are such avid social media users."
Social learning
Adolescence is a period that is very important for social learning, which could explain
why teens are often more tuned in to what's going on in their respective cultures. With
the rise of social media, Sherman thinks we may even be learning to read likes and
shares instead of facial expressions.
"Before, if you were having a face to face interaction everything is qualitative. You use
someone's gestures or facial expressions, that sort of thing, to see how effective your
message is," she says.
"Now if you go online, one of the ways that you gauge the effectiveness of your message
is in the number of likes, favorites or retweets, and this is something that's really
different and unique about online interaction."
This is your brain on LSD, literally
However, the study may not be applicable to everyone, according to Dr. Iroise
Dumontheil, at Birkbeck University.
"[The study] only has adolescents and so they can't really claim anything specific about
whether it's adolescents who react to this differently compared to adults."
Changing the brain
Dumontheil does, however, concur that social media is affecting our brain, particularly
its plasticity, which is the way the brain grows and changes after experiencing different
things.
"Whenever you learn something new or you experience something, it's encoded in your
brain, and it's encoded by subtle changes in the strength of connections between
neurons," says Dumontheil.
For example, one study showed that the white matter in an adults' brains changed as
they learned how to juggle over a period of several months. "They found that if you
scan [the brains of] adults before they learn how to juggle, and then three months later,
you can see changes in the brain structure," says Dumontheil.
Time spent on social media could, therefore, also cause the brain to change and grow.
"We might be a bit less good at reading subtle expressions on faces that are moving,
but we might be much quicker at monitoring what's going on in a whole group of our
friends.