Social network sites may be changing people’s brains as well as their social life, research suggests. Brain scans show a direct link between the number of Facebook friends a person has and the size of certain parts of their brain.

It’s not clear whether using social networks boosts grey matter or if those with certain brain structures are good at making friends, say researchers. The regions involved have roles in social interaction, memory and autism.

The work, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences, looked at 3-D brain scans of 125 university students from London. Researchers counted the number of Facebook friends each volunteer had, as well as assessing the size of their network of real friends. A strong link was found between the number of Facebook friends a person had and the amount of grey matter in certain parts of their brain.
The study also showed that the number of Facebook friends a person was in touch with was reflected in the number of “real-world” friends.

“We cannot escape the ubiquity of the internet and its impact on our lives, yet we understand little of its impact on the brain, which we know is plastic and can change over time”

Dr John Williams, Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust

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Ulillillia is a 25 year old reclusive videogame addict who describes anywhere outside of an 8 mile radius of his house as “unknown territory”. He runs a website which is basically an overly technical and descriptive journal of many assets of his life.

On of the most interesting and disturbing parts of his website is the one where Ulilillia describes the “mind game” he sometimes plays:

“This animated GIF above shows some of the few thrills and crazy stunts I do in my mind game, a futuristic-like video game I play in my mind often. It takes a day or two to climb a mountain 6900 feet high, but in my mind game, with the use of the float run and numerous other special abilities, it takes under a minute. The above animation is in true time and is scaled realistically with very strong 3D effects. The behavior exactly matches that in my mind game. The animation loops forever and lasts about 80 seconds per loop, the time it takes to go up and down the mountain.”

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Interesting to see how Google employees rate their own services, especially when they think that their post will be dealt with internally… See what comes out when Google software engineer Steve Yegge speaks his mind – and releases a very critical article about Google+ – accidentally, of course.

A Google software engineer, Steve Yegge, had some less than favorable things to say about his employer’s social networking service Google+. You know, the one that Google says “is Google.”

He crafted a lengthy and very critical post about Google+ to share within Google, but accidentally shared it publicly (hat tip to Frederic Lardinois). Of course, others were able to capture it before he deleted it.

Here are some quotes from the rant.

“I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I’ve been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies — an impression that has been reinforced almost daily — is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right.”

That’s how it began. Good start, in Google’s eyes no doubt, considering the building rivalry between those two companies. In fact, much of post talks about how Google does most things better than Amazon, except for a few. Eventually, he talks about how Google’s “doesn’t get” platforms.

Here are some of the Google+-specific quotes:

“Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don’t get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: “So is it the Stalker API?” She got all glum and said “Yeah.” I mean, I was joking, but no… the only API call we offer is to get someone’s stream. So I guess the joke was on me.”

Read the full story here.