Neuroscience of Social Media and Belonging
Your brain on social media: It's not just addictive, it's transformative. Here's why.
In this episode of the Brain Blown Podcast, we're logging into the neuroscience of social media and belonging.
We'll explore:
Why that notification "ping" feels so irresistible
How social media taps into our primal need for connection
The surprising ways our brains react to likes, comments, and shares
Why teenagers' brains are particularly susceptible to social media's allure
The neural pathways that light up when we're scrolling – and how they're changing over time
From the prefrontal cortex to the ventral striatum, we're mapping the brain's social media hotspots. Join us as we uncover the fascinating relationship between our neurons and our newsfeeds.
Plus, we'll discuss how this digital revolution is providing neuroscientists with unprecedented insights into human behavior and social cognition.
Tune in, and you might just see your next post through a whole new lens.
Look out for more mini-episodes on this topic in the coming weeks!
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If you have any topic suggestions for future episodes, don't hesitate to reach out! Send us an email at info@brainblownpodcast.com.
We'd love to hear from you.
REFERENCES
"The Emerging Neuroscience of Social Media" Dar Meshi, Diana I. Tamir, and Hauke R. Heekeren
"Social Influence on Positive Youth Development: A Developmental Neuroscience Perspective" Eva H. Telzer, Jorien van Hoorn, Christina R. Rogers, Kathy T. Do
"The neuroscience of social feelings: mechanisms of adaptive social functioning" Paul J. Eslinger, Silke Anders, Tommaso Ballarini, Sydney Boutros, Soren Krach, Annalina V. Mayer, Jorge Moll, Tamara L. Newton, Matthias L. Schroeter, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, Jacob Raber, Gavin B. Sullivan, James E. Swain, Leroy Lowe, Roland Zahn
"Brain and Social Networks: Fundamental Building Blocks of Human Experience" Emily B. Falk and Danielle S. Bassett
"Mind the Gender Gap" Gina Rippon
"Change: How to Make Big Things Happen" Damon Centola
General Outline of Episode
(Cherys)
On the podcast we’re looking at the Neuroscience of Social Media and Belonging
Imagine you're scrolling through your social media feed. A notification pops up – someone liked your latest post. You feel a small surge of excitement. You keep scrolling, liking, commenting, sharing. Before you know it, an hour has passed.
Have you ever wondered why social media is so captivating? Why do we feel a rush of satisfaction when our posts get attention, and a sting of rejection when they don't? And why does scrolling through our feeds sometimes feel like a vital connection to others, even when we're physically alone?
Today, we're looking at our brains to understand why social media has such a powerful grip on us. We'll uncover how social media hooks into our deep need to belong and how it lights up our brain’s reward systems. And if you think it's addictive for adults, wait till you hear what it does to teenage brains!
(Laine)
Let’s unravel the complex relationship between our brains and our screens, and discover how social media is literally rewiring our brains.
This is the Neuroscience of Social Media
Let's start off with what do we mean by that:
Tufts University states social media is “the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks”
Meshi, Tamir and Heekeren state this provides a place where humans today can satisfy “basic social needs” around three areas “ social cognition (i.e., mentalizing) (or getting in the mind of someone else), self-referential cognition (what we know about ourselves), and social reward processing (feeling good about interacting with others)”
But why has this taken off so quickly? Why do we do it? What need does it fill? And how is it changing us?
In short - we do it for the same reason we do many things. As we’ve covered at great lengths humans are driven by a need for pleasure and we are social creatures. We need each other. Without other humans, we are prey. But social media, unlike traditional human interactions, gives us gratification in a way IRL life doesn’t always. We get likes and follows to show we did the right thing, we are conforming to society well, and we are succeeding. And we get it significantly faster. So if you’ve been a fan of this podcast for a while, it will not surprise you we are going to talk about some very familiar brain areas but also some that might surprise you.
Social media connects with our need to fit in, to be with our tribe, to not be alone. Baumester and Leary stated this was about belongingness emphasizing “the importance of being involved with others as a universal and fundamental human need”
At the heart of all of this - is we do this to belong, to have a sense of belonging. To feel we belong. Eslinger, Anders, et all state “A "feeling" is a fundamental construct in the behavioral, neurobiological and social psychological sciences encompassing a range of subjective experiences.” They state this is connected to survival and life. They state when we say feeling we might be referring to a sensation, emotion, perecetion, form of thought, impression or opinion, inclination, or overall physical or posyclogical experience’. Feelings are body-related - that is what makes them different than thoughts. And state “Feelings are considered an affective component/constituent of emotional responses.” So in other words we do this, not just because it's fun or because we’ve decided it's a good idea but because we need to feel we belong. And that is a much more intense drive.
Rubin states belonging is about a “conscious or unconscious assessment of any expected value may not just be based on potential gains in earnings and/or social status or for altruistic motives, but will also include the perceived opportunity for ingroup membership or inter-personal attachments”. And it explains more about human behavior than we may be comfortable with.
Again we like to believe we are very independent and there is a social status of being the ‘lone wolf’. In reality - at least looking at the brain - that is garbage. We are wired as humans in every way possible to need people. That is a scientific fact.
And not only is it about having friends, or having a support system - its about belonging to a greater unit. So this moves into human morality very quickly. Eslinger, Anders et all state that this is socio-moral, because this feeling of belonging can connect to the interest or welfare of society as a whole (or even just more than you).
They also come with the fear of not belonging which is where we can get guilt, embarrassment, loneliness, and rejection.
Eslinger, Anders et all also state that humans have a unique ability not only to attach to humans, but also attach to nonhumans, cultural symbols, ideas, beliefs, etc which they say “may contribute to the remarkable human inclination to cooperate beyond kinship boundaries, due to intrinsic reward, even when no evident reputation gains are at stake”. They say this can be a cornerstone, so is it any surprise we get so heated on the internet when it feels like one is violating our norms or rights?
And social disgust is as strong as physical disgust. Your brain will respond as hard to the behavior you find repugnant the same way it will to vomit or feces.
In short, we feel a need to belong. And it elicits some very strong reactions.
Dubar and Schults and Liberman state, our behaviors will “constantly be adapted to fulfill that need”. Gina Rippon states that we will change our behavior to get involved due to a sense of this need. However, not only will our behavior change. It's difficult to just talk about what it does to the brain - because the more we interact with it, the more it can also change our brain.
What is the brain’s role?
A lot actually. There is a lot going on here depending on what you are doing.
Mentalizing - understanding the mental states and motivations of others
We do this before we post - what will others think about it
Writing feedback on posts - how will it land with that person
Reading other people's posts - we might think about why someone posted this
Meshi, Tamir, and Heekeren AND Telzer, van Hoorn, Roger both state When we mentalize we use our “dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), bilateral temporoparietal junction (TPJ), anterior temporal lobes (ATL), inferior frontal gyri (IFG), and posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (PCC)”. So dorsomedial prefrontal cortex - is that area near the bottom of the prefrontal cortex - hence dorsal, as dorsal means back, and it's kinda your brain’s middle manager. It's supposed to keep our amygdala in check - though it doesn’t always - it has working memory, planning, abstract reasoning, theory of mind, sense of self, empathy, decision-making, and morality. Etc. No shock we will see a lot of it in this episode. The bilateral temporoparietal junction is where the temporal and parietal lobes meet. Hence junction. It connects your limbic system takes information from your senses and is involved in language. Inferior frontal gyri is also involved in language. Anterior temporal lobes we needed for semantic memory (people, words, facts, etc) whereas the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus is used for episodic/autobiographical memory - which means we also use it to imagine the future and make sense of space and scene. All of these are very near each other in terms of geographical location. And we use these when we share information and when others share information with us. We add in the medial prefrontal cortex and the prefrontal cortex when we share information about ourselves. For the person reading it - similar areas of the brain fire and this can cause us to actually change our own “beliefs, preferences, and actions to align with those of the communicators” according to Falk and Bassett.
So specifically Falk and Bassett will state we find value in sharing information but we also find value in self-disclosure and social bonding and both can be motivated when we post something.
Falk and Bassett will also remind us that areas of the brain we use for communicating ideas, beliefs, etc don’t “operate in isolation. We have the hotspot areas we have seen before, but there is a greater web activation with “myelinated neuronal axons”. Specifically Eslinger, Anders, et all state this is connected to the social behavior neural network (SBNN) which includes the areas mentioned and adds in “posterior bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNSTp), lateral septum (LS), medial preoptic area (MPOA), ventromedial hypothalamus (VMH), anterior hypothalamus (AH), and periaqueductal grey” which are impacted by hormones, reciprocally interconnected and regulate social behavior
I mentioned being impacted by hormones. Yep, specifically or old friend oxytocin is a huge component here (as well as vasopressin - they are associated with social recognition, social attachment, and social behavior. Especially we also have “Subtype Avpr1a is a transmembrane G-protein-coupled receptor found in several brain nuclei and is involved in the regulation of a range of social behaviors, including sibling conflict, agreeableness, and impulsive aggression” and Avpr1b which is connected to aggression, stress, and social memory. Really this connects back to attachment - because this is about social attachment.
If you’ve listened to our episodes on the neuroscience of addiction or pleasure, it will be no surprise to you that Meshi, Tamir, and Heekeren AND Telzer, van Hoorn, Roger AND Falk and Bassett AND Eslinger, Anders, et all are all taking about those addiction areas. Meshi, Tamir, and Heekeren state “Social rewards activate a network of brain regions including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), ventral striatum, and ventral tegmental area”. When we get positive feedback, when it seems like people understand us, agree with us, think like us, think highly of us, connect with us, see us, etc., this gives us rewards
When we compare ourselves to others: on social media we activate the ventral striatum
Paying attention: A tricky part about social media is as Meshi, Tamir, and Heekeren state we have to pay attention to a lot of stimuli, make decisions, and respond. They state this uses “the frontoparietal attention network [47], the executive function network”
Feeling like we belong: Eslinger, Anders, et all state that research on social media has gone into the science of feeling like we belong and how we bond at a group level. What we see is similar to what we saw in empathy, some of what we talked about last episode on influence. They are described as ‘like love’ and we have individual pride and group pride and they are very similar - this is connected to belonging to a bigger whole.
And of course fear. Belonging has a flip side of not belonging. We can’t go an episode without talking about our amygdala - specifically this is often seen with a higher level of activation with people with larger social networks. Hyptozised by Falk and Basset that “social network structures both shape the types of social interaction that people have and are also shaped by individual differences in the tendency to use the brain in particular ways” and will argue that more popular people in social media are perceived differently- in fact, we increase the amount we will mentalize and value people who have a bigger social network and interestingly enough more popular people are more accurate when asked how others view them. In this case, we have data to show that increased social networks can cause you to have a larger amygdala (meshi, tamir, heekeren)
And pain. Ripon will state the bilateral insula and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)are areas that fire because those are areas connected to processing physical pain or social pain. Ripon states the “ACC is sometimes dubbed the GoNoGo or the “error-evaluation” area, as it is consistently activated in tasks requiring inhibition, either to withhold a response or to change a response following an error”. And this and our insula are activated due to concern with loss of self-esteem when we have negative experiences on line and that fear of social rejection causes us to withdraw.
A big question right now - what about youth?
Telzer, van Hoorn, Rogers and Do argue that we have a lot of literature that shows that adolescents will engage in risky behavior when their friends do. And this is partially because of neuroplasticity - specifically increased levels of neuroplasticity. As we’ve covered, at great length, the brain is always plastic - always rewiring itself. But there are specific areas of hyperplastic. For example, before age 2 you can learn a language without having an accent -this is because of a specific hyperplastic window that exists at that time. In adolescence, we see hyperplasticity (levels of which are only slightly lower than what we see in infancy!) as the adolescent brain “undergoes a major “social reorientation”, which may render adolescents particularly susceptible to social influences.”
Telzer, van Hoorn, and Roger state adolescence is characterized by “changes in the neural circuitry underlying” “heightened orientation to social cues, (2) greater sensitivity to social rewards and punishments, and (3) compromised cognitive control”
So the areas we covered on mentalization - we see a higher level of activation among adolescents when processing social information due to this
And the ventral striatum that we mentioned - “Compared to children and adults, adolescents show heightened sensitivity to rewards in the VS particularly in the presence of peers” and “also show heightened VS and amygdala activation to socially appetitive stimuli.”. In other words, during adolescence, we are uniquely attuned to social rewards.
What can we do about the information we just learned?
Brains are plastic. When we do things - specifically with focused attention and time, the brain changes.
Falk and Bassett state “we argue that understanding brains and social networks in the context of one another is not only important, but also critically necessary, because the two are interacting systems: brain dynamics shape learning and behavior [24], including social interaction [25]; likewise, social contexts alter brain structure and function”
Social media, in short, has addictive tendencies. Because it has the ability to rewire your brain. More so if its hyper plastic.
Not all of it is bad, but it is something to be aware of
Final Thoughts
Social media is fantastic for neuroscience research. Both Falk and Basset and Meshi, Tamir, and Heekeren state that social media allows us to understand humans, our need for social connection, and the impact of group think with harder points of data and on real-time.
Meshi, Tamir, and Heekeren state “Neuroscientists have only just begun to leverage this approach to gain a deeper understanding of human social cognition and neural functioning.” However, they will also state that social media can elicit behaviors very different from face-to-face because we don’t have the norm of reciprocity - which means we sometimes really over self-disclose. In face-to-face people spend approx 30% of their time sharing about themselves, online its 80%. And its probably no surprise that our politeness norms and being cordial - with distance this norm is radically changed. For scientists, this is fascinating because it allows the ability to study the root of our social behavior and how it is impacted by our environment.
Specifically, Falk and Bassett state study of social networks and the brain holds a lot of possibility to explain our understanding of the collective and the ability to predict group behavior, gain insight as to why, and potentially intervene. They will specifically highlight how ideas, emotions, and behaviors spread from person to person because “belonging and coordination are critical for human survival” but to understand how ideas and behaviors spread - that is only started to be studied. We are on the brink of learning more, the question is, at what cost?
