Facebook’s effect on the brain ‘just like cocaine’

FACEBOOK can affect the brain in a similar way to cocaine, a study has suggested.

It may explain people why some users claim they find social media sites addictive.

The site stimulates the brain’s amygdala and striatum – the same regions associated with compulsive behaviour, scientists found.

Facebook fans get a ‘brain reward’ when they look at their friends’s pictures as they trigger a sense of social inclusion.

Cocaine addicts get the same reward when they are using the drug. Researchers at California State University explained: ‘The findings indicate that technology-related “addictions” share neural features with substance and gambling addictions.’

But they stressed that Facebook is not quite as addictive as cocaine – because it does not impair the region of the brain which allows people to curb their behaviour.

Experts asked 20 people to assess whether they felt ‘addiction-like’ symptoms such as anxiety when using the site.

They were then shown a sequence of images on a screen and asked to press a button when certain icons appeared.

Images included a series of Facebookrelated pictures such as the website’s logo and icons, as well as randomly-selected ‘con- trol’ images. Brain scans revealed that images relating to Facebook activated the amygdala and striatum – which are also stimulated by cocaine.

Nearly 1.6billion people log into the social networking site every month – more than the entire population of China. Academics have previously claimed that Facebook is ‘more addictive than tobacco and alcohol’, and that regular users suffer withdrawal symptoms when they try to avoid it.