I remember when The Facebook website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and I was excited about it as was many others. I had been listening to young people talk about MySpace as THE space to be on, but for me it was too primitive and juvenile and I looked forward to this new aspect of communication called “social media”.

I was excited to using FaceBook to catch up with old friends and stay in touch with new ones. It started out as people actually writing to each other almost like short letters or paragraphs. Fast forward to 2017. Now it is mostly reposting of memes, articles, links to sites and all those moronic “tests” you can take. A lot of people fall for these so called tests because, after all, they are all about you! Most people don’t know that they are merely phishing schemes to gather your information and hack your accounts.

I don’t “do” Facebook anymore. There is nothing there for me to learn. People say it is great because you can keep up with your friends and family. Hmmmm, haven’t we done that for centuries without FaceBook? I am disappointed for what FB has become. It is a narcissistic playground for most. Humans want to be validated, affirmed, liked and popular. This outlet serves those needs but to me it is sad that a “like” is now a technical substitute for a hug or an affirmation that “you like me, you really like me”. I like the old fashioned kind. A big old warm, organic, bear hug and a face-to-face compliment.

I have always been interested in how our brain works on basically everything and continue to educate myself on this most important organ that a lot of people don’t even think about. They take care of the body but neglect the health of their brain.

So I was wondering what effect FaceBook had on your brain. I did some research and found this article and study from Time Magazine on just that. Here it is:

This is your brain on FaceBook 

By Maia Szalavitz

That little zing you get when someone “likes” your picture or sings your praises on Facebook? That’s the reward center in your brain getting a boost.

And that response can predict how much time and energy you put into the social media site, according to new research.

In one of the first studies to connect social media use and brain imaging data, scientists led by Dar Meshi, a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität in Berlin, imaged the brains of 31 Facebook users while they viewed pictures of either themselves or others that were accompanied by positive captions. The research was published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

“We found that we could predict the intensity of people’s Facebook use outside the scanner by looking at their brain’s response to positive social feedback inside the scanner,” says Meshi. Specifically, a region called the nucleus accumbens, which processes rewarding feelings about food, sex, money and social acceptance became more active in response to praise for oneself compared to praise of others. And that activation was associated with more time on the social media site.

Social affirmation tends to be one of life’s great joys, whether it occurs online or off, so it’s not surprising that it would light up this area. Few people are immune to the lures of flattery, after all. But do these results suggest that the “likes” on Facebook can become addictive? While all addictive experiences activate the region, such activation alone isn’t sufficient to establish an addiction.

It does, however, raise the interesting possibility that these affirmations might be the first step toward an addiction for some people, since Facebook use also shares another property common to addictive behaviors. On the social media site, the pleasure deriving from attention, kind words, likes, and LOLs from others occurs only sporadically. Such a pattern for rewards is far more addictive than receiving a prize every time, in part because the brain likes to predict rewards, and if it can’t find a pattern, it will fuel a behavior until it finds one. So if the rewards are random, the quest may continue compulsively. “Our research is a nice first step in making the neurobiological link between social media addiction and reward activity in the brain,” says Meshi.

Facebook may draw people in by making them feel connected— but it keeps them coming back because so many of us take pleasure in knowing that we’re liked.

And there you have it, my friends…

DeeDee