London, Scientists have discovered a direct link between the numbers of “friends” on Facebook, social media and the size of certain brain regions, raising the possibility that using online social networks might change our brains.

Emotional responses and social interactions are the role played by the four parts of the brain; however it is impossible to say that if you have more friends on facebook your brain parts are getting healthier. Ryota Kanai of University College London (UCL) said that “The exciting question now is whether these structures change over time – this will help us answer the question of whether the Internet is changing our brains,”

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), Kanai and colleagues studied the brains of 125 universities students and all of them are the users of social website facebook, and crosschecked their findings in a further group of 40 students.

They found a strong interaction between the facebook users and the amount of “grey matter” in the amygdale, the right superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right entorhinal cortex. Grey matter is the place where processes occur.

The thickness of this layer was also linked to the number of real world friends but other three regions looks to be correlated to online connections. Mostly students have around 300 friends on facebook, most connected up to 1000. Especially among the youth facebook is most active component of social interaction. It has about 800 million active users.

Geraint Rees from UCL said that “Online social networks are massively influential, yet we understand very little about the impact they have on our brains. This has led to a lot of unsupported speculation the Internet is somehow bad for us.” The study results were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, on Wednesday.

Heidi Johansen-Berg of the University of Oxford, who was not invited in the research make her views that this research was admirable but it did not means that facebook is a quick way to make brains healthier.  More she said “If you got yourself 100 new Facebook friends today then your brain would not be bigger tomorrow.” “The study cannot tell us whether using the Internet is good or bad for our brains.”