INT. DAY. SOMEWHERE IN BERLIN MITTE – DAR MESHI (CENTER FOR COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE BERLIN)
M
How would you describe your neuroscience research with social media?
Dar Meshi
In general, I study how social information gets processed in the brain and how that information motivates us to act and make decisions in the real world. More specifically, I am interested in how we value reputational information, and how we manage our reputation online using social media platforms.
M
How has social media changed our social interactions?
DAR MESHI
Well, all social interaction as we evolved used to be face-to-face, meaning you had a given physical context, with body movements, facial expressions, etc. Then with the written letter, the telephone, and now with the Internet and social media, technology has provided various new ways for people to communicate. Interestingly, social media platforms allow for people to obtain more frequent social rewards and in much higher quantities, than the face-to-face social contexts that we evolved in. Furthermore, on social media, this physical social context I mentioned is missing.
M
What studies have you done?
DAR MESHI
I’ve given people reputation-related social rewards, like compliments, and examined how their brain’s response is linked to their social media use. I found that the more sensitive people’s brains are to social rewards, the more intensely they use Facebook. I’ve also looked at the functional connectivity of the brain in relation to how much self-related information people are sharing on Facebook. Both of these studies capitalized on measures of social media use to examine brain function.
M
In reverse, could one deduce that the brain structure or function changes in response to social media use?
DAR MESHI
That’s a great question. I can tell you that no study has yet examined this. We simply don’t know yet if or how the brain is responding to social media use and if this response is good, bad or inconsequential.
To note, there are some scientists out there who warn that the Internet and social media can affect our brain in a very negative way. But again, in reality there haven’t been any performed studies yet.
M
You mentioned “capitalizing on measures of social media use”, what do you mean by this?
DAR MESHI
Contemporary research hasn’t focused on finding the effects of social media use on the brain, we’ve more focused on using measures of social media use to better understand the brain. What scientists can do is use behaviors on social media as a proxy for a real-world social behavior; meaning, we relate the behavior on social media to a brain measure, substituting it for the real world behavior in order to understand the brain from that aspect.
M
Could you maybe give an example?
DAR MESHI
In your everyday life you have a social network – not an online social network but a real world network of your friends and family. If I interviewed you, we could figure out the size of your social network and your place within it (are you a hub, a connector between hubs, etc.). In 2010, a study did exactly this and assessed the size of the real-world social network of a bunch of people and then looked at their brain structure. This research demonstrated that a region of the brain called the amygdala positively correlates with social network size across individuals. So the bigger your real-world social network, the bigger your amygdala is and vice versa. These days you (and many others) also have a social network on Facebook, and researchers can use your online network as a proxy for your real-world social network. In 2012, some other researchers did the same experiment that I just described, but they also examined online social network size — the number of Facebook friends — and related it to brain structure. These researchers found the exact same relationship with the amygdala — the bigger your online social network the bigger your amygdala. This is just one example of how scientists can actually use social media measures as a proxy for real-world behavioral measures, and you can imagine how useful social media data could be if there were no easy way to measure something in the real world. We can just substitute the social media measure.
M
And do you think that a person having a lot of friends on Facebook is actually also the same as having a big real world social network? Or couldn’t it just be the exact opposite, meaning that in the real world, this person is more of a loner?
DAR MESHI
Absolutely. That type of person, with a small real-world social network but large online social network, definitely exists. The research isn’t affected too much by individuals like this because scientists use a large number of participants for statistical reasons, but no neuroscience study has yet examined these specific types of individuals. Social media certainly allows you to be social in a way that the real world doesn’t afford you to be. Social media is more controlled and there are aspects that favor more relaxed communication compared than face-to-face interactions, like having more time to respond when communicating on social media, etc.
M
But do you think that social media is influencing our real world social networks, meaning that we are becoming more “social” or “sociable”?
DAR MESHI
That’s a really good question. There’s a professor at Oxford, Robin Dunbar, who put forth a theory called the “social brain hypothesis” in the late 90’s. Dunbar noticed that human brain size is relatively large compared to other primates, so he theorized that this was to manage our complex social interactions. He demonstrated that across species, primate brain size positively correlates with the size of their social group; meaning that the bigger a species’ brain, the bigger the average size of a social group with that species. In humans the group size was around 150. This is the average number of individuals that our brain has capacity to interact with.
M
And are online social networks changing Dunbar’s number?
DAR MESHI
Actually, Dunbar just recently put out a paper demonstrating that social networks don’t.
M
You were explaining that “the brain has capacity for” social interaction? What exactly do you mean by that?
DAR MESHI
Social cognition is highly taxing for the brain. It is very cognitively complex and requires a lot of energy and resources. So this was a major factor driving our brain size during evolution, i.e. the group size grew with the brain size.
M
Earlier you mentioned “social rewards”, what do you mean by this and how do you see the connection to social cognition?
DAR MESHI
To explain, I’ll first talk about rewards in general. Back in the 60’s two researchers from Canada, Olds and Milner, did an experiment: they placed a rat in a box with a button and nothing else, letting the animal explore the box. On average the animal hit the button 25 times an hour. Then Olds and Milner put an electrode somewhere in the rat’s brain that was hooked up to the button and a battery, providing an electric charge directly to the brain of the rat whenever the button was pressed. Olds and Milner measured how many times the animal hit the button and observed that the rat would press the button more or less depending on where the electrode was placed in the brain. The idea is that if the animal pressed the button less than 25 times an hour, they didn’t like the stimulation in that region of the brain, and if they pressed the button more than 25 times an hour, they found the stimulation pleasurable or rewarding. There were certain regions in the brain where the animal only hit the button 4 times an hour, so they concluded that stimulating this region of the brain wasn’t pleasurable. Yet in other brain regions the animal hit the button much more. One place in particular was very rewarding and the animal pressed the button up to 7000 times an hour. This was when the electrode was placed in the “median forebrain bundle”, which connects the ventral tegmental area of the midbrain to the striatum with dopamine neurons. Olds and Milner had discovered the reward system of the brain. Since the 1960’s we found out that anytime we obtain something we value, this area activates (like when we gain money, or when we take certain drugs, or when we have sex, etc.). It’s basically a neural circuit for motivation to obtain all these things. Then in 2008, a researcher named Keise Izuma and his colleagues did a study demonstrating that positive social interactions, like when someone gives a person a compliment, activate this circuit as well. People find social connection and gains in reputation rewarding.
M
Would you then say that social media, like Facebook and other platforms, activate this social reward system?
DAR MESHI
Yes, the first study to definitively show this was just published. Lauren Sherman and her colleagues at UCLA gave people Instagram “likes” in the MRI scanner. Their analysis showed that the more likes someone received, the more activation was observed in their reward system. So we can definitely say now that social media is a source for social rewards.
M
So basically the reward system in the real world or in social media is the same, right?
DAR MESHI
Yes, even though it’s a “virtual” world it’s a place for real social rewards, i.e. you’re having real interactions and people are actually spending time on social media to obtain these social rewards. People are even interrupting their real-world social interactions to interact online, on social media platforms. Whether these rewards on social media actually have any real value is another question though.
M
Would you say that social media is a kind of contemporary loophole, where people can easily get their social rewards, without taking too many risks? And is this a symptom of our contemporary time?
DAR MESHI
Yes, I think that social media provide easy access to social rewards, but I’m not so sure that people aren’t taking risks. If someone posts something controversial, they might receive negative feedback and their reputation might take a hit. Also, even though using social media is an accepted norm in our contemporary society, how far you’re willing to accept the use of social media varies between individuals. For example, one person may think it’s acceptable to pull out their phone at dinner, take a picture of their meal, and post it online for their social network to see. Another person may find this behavior rude. So using social media is not without its risks. Of note though, social media have definitely altered the social norm landscape for some and it will be interesting to see how these norms evolve as new social media technologies continue to enter our contemporary lives.
M
Lets widen a little your example of the dinner situation and talk about the role this person has? I mean how would you describe this person, as a consumer or as a producer of social media, or as a “prosumer” – to use a term by the futurist Alvin Toffler that one encounters now often in the field of contemporary art?
DAR MESHI
Yeah, I definitely agree with Toffler on this point. If you’re posting on social media and also reading other’s posts, you’re a prosumer. To me, it’s interesting that these behaviors are socially motivated. I’m really looking forward to disentangling the drive to produce for one’s social network from the drive to consume information from one’s social network.