People With Bigger Brains Have More Friends.

Oxford University researchers found maintaining friendships requires more brain power.

Their study concluded that people with real friends have to use more cognitive skills to understand what someone else thought. This, however, did not occur with "online" friends, such as those made on social networking sites including Facebook or Twitter. Scientists discovered a link between the number of friends people had and the size of their orbital prefrontal cortex, which is a region of the brain found just above the eyes. The conclusions, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows for the first time that competency in social skills is determined by the size of peoples' brains. People who have a bigger brain have more real friends, a British study has suggested.


"We found that individuals who had more friends did better on mentalising tasks and had more neural volume in the orbital frontal cortex, the part of the forebrain immediately above the eyes," said Prof Robin Dunbar, who led the study. "Understanding this link between an individuals brain size and the number of friends they have helps us understand the mechanisms that have led to humans developing bigger brains than other primate species. "The frontal lobes of the brain, in particular, have enlarged dramatically in humans over the last half million years."