Social media use is widely common around the world today, from television shows to social networking sites to texting among friends. As the next generation grows, one issue that some parents contemplate is how it all will affect their child. While an adolescent's brain develops, so will their personality or behaviors. Social media, specifically, can influence the connections the brain makes in both beneficial ways, such as developing new creative skills and making new bonds with others, and negative ways, like stunting an individual's social growth or inundate a teen with addiction.
During adolescence, the brain has already made its final developments. It is also during this time that teens have become fully immersed in the world of technology which could potentially affect the connections the brain makes. Jay Giedd, a chief researcher of the Unit on Brain Imaging in the Child Psychiatry Branch at the NIMH, did a study in which he took a look at the brains of 145 relatively normal children at two-year intervals. He wanted to learn how, exactly, the brain grows and he found that there is a second wave of synapses formation that spark a growth in the prefrontal cortex just before puberty (Spinks). The technology that teens use every day for multiple hours could influence or create new structures in the brain, affecting how an individual could think and how they could react to situations in the real world. For example, Harvard Medical University conducted a research that involved three groups of adult volunteers who could play the piano. All three groups were taken into identical rooms that contained identical pianos for five days. .
The first group was told to practice their piano exercises; the second group was told to do absolutely nothing with the instrument and the third group was told to imagine they were practicing the exercises. The resulting brain scans showed that, unsurprisingly, the group that did nothing had no structural changes in their brain.
