Teens’ obsession with social media and the brain connection

It starts at the age of two (could be even earlier) and then never goes away; we are talking about the smartphone addiction! The addiction, most highly noted in teenagers, could be intoxicating to growing brains, say Neuroscientists in a new research study.

Approximately 90 percent of American teens say they use at least one social media site, and 71 percent of teens say they use at least two sites.

Scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles found in the first study to scan teenagers’ brains (which included 32 teenagers, aged 13 to 18)while they use social media, that a certain part of the brain connected with rewards buzzes with activity whenever teens see one of their photos earn “likes.”

Lauren Sherman, lead author of the brain scan study and a researcher at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center said, “It may be that one of the reasons that teens are such active users on social media is that they’re really sensitive to these likes.”

She further added, "They’re really sensitive to what their peers are doing online.”

The team performed a second study where teenagers were asked to post 40 photos on their Instagram account. The team showed 148 photos on a computer screen with fake likes and as the teens viewed the photos, researchers scanned their brains with an MRI machine and observed that certain images stimulated parts of their brain. When one of the teenagers saw that his own photo had earned a large number of “likes,” several centers in the brain associated with social activity and visuals lit up, like nucleus accumbens, which is linked to rewards and lights up when a person does pleasurable things like eating chocolate or winning money.

Sherman says,"The “likes” on the photo provide an immediate, tangible reward, which lights up parts of the adolescent brain like the nucleus accumbens that are primed to overreact to every pleasure and happiness. That’s one of the reasons social media is more compelling. It helps explain what’s going on and why teens find it so interesting.”

However, the findings do not suggest that social media access will necessarily harm teens as according to the study teens were influenced by the “liking” activity of their peers no matter what the subject of the photo was which means that peer influence could go either way.