The larger your brain is, the more friends you have. This is what is being said by a team of researchers from the University of Oxford.
Keeping up friendships takes brain power, research found, and people with real friends — as opposed to pals on social network sites — have to employ more cognitive skills to understand what someone is thinking.
Researchers have found a link between the number of friends people have and the size of their orbital prefrontal cortex. Tests were conducted on 40 people, with scientists taking anatomical magnetic resonance (MR) images of their brains to measure the size of their prefrontal cortex, which is used for high-level thinking.
Photo: AFP
照片：法新社
Participants were asked to make a list of people they had social — rather than professional — contact with over a seven-day period. They also took a test to determine how competent they were at “mentalizing,” which is the capacity to understand what another person is thinking — a crucial aspect in how people handle the social world.
Results — published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B — showed a connection between people with a large friendship group and a larger prefrontal cortex.
(Liberty Times)
Photo: Reuters
照片：路透
你的腦越大，你就有越多朋友：牛津大學研究團隊是這麼說的。
研究發現，保持友誼耗費大腦的力量，而且擁有真正的朋友－－而非社群網站上的夥伴－必須運用更多認知技巧來了解某人在想什麼。
研究人員發現朋友數與大腦前額葉皮質區的大小有關聯。科學家在四十人身上測試，以核磁共振攝影掃描他們的大腦，測量他們用來進行高層級思考的前額葉的尺寸。
參與者被要求列出他們在七天內有社交接觸而非工作接觸的人名，他們也參與測試，了解他們的「認知」能力有多強，所謂的認知能力就是了解其他人在想什麼的能力，這是人們應對社交世界的一個關鍵面向。
刊登在《皇家學會學報—生物學》的研究結果顯示，朋友群很大的人，前額葉也大。
（自由時報/編譯：國際新聞中心）
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