Being addicted to Facebook can affect the brain in a similar manner to cocaine, new research suggests. However, Facebook can, it turns out, be much easier to quit than the drug…
The Telegraph reports academics’ discovery that Facebook addiction could be discerned in brain scans of particularly avid users of the social media site. A study saw undergraduates completing a questionnaire assessing their level of Facebook addiction, before being shown a series of images and asked to press a button when each image appeared.
Some of the participants in the study, published in Psychological Reports: Disability and Trauma, actually responded more quickly to Facebook stimuli than to road signs. However, researchers still found the brain’s impulsive systems to work well for Facebook addicts – which is not the case with drug addicts.
Professor Ofir Turel of California State University speculated that Facebook addiction “stems from low motivation to control the behavior, which is due partly to the relatively benign societal and personal consequences of technology overuse, compared to, say, substance abuse”.