A new study has just been published in Scientific Reports that I was involved with at the Free University of Berlin. Dar Meshi, the lead author of the paper, is interested in how social information is processed in the brain, and in this paper we investigated whether individual differences in sharing information about oneself on Facebook translate into individual differences in region-specific neural connectivity. Basically, the idea was to see whether there is an association between how active people say they are on Facebook with regards to sharing self-related information (e.g. frequent changes or updates to one’s profile picture, information, status; frequent tagging and posting of pictures or videos) and how strongly different cortical regions connect when the brain is at rest (i.e. not involved in any particular task). Interestingly, our results support the idea of a brain-behavior association, for we found that how much people share about themselves on Facebook was associated with differential connectivity of cortical midline regions.

To read the full paper and find out how these regions are hypothesized to sub-serve self-related information sharing, go to http://www.nature.com/articles/srep22491.

Meshi, D., Mamerow, L., Kirilina, E., Morawetz, C., Margulies, D.S., & Heekeren, H.R. (2016). Sharing self-related information is associated with intrinsic functional connectivity of cortical midline brain regions. Scientific Reports, 6, 22491. DOI: 10.1038/srep22491