tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21605329.post5786248106389412307..comments2024-03-22T00:30:09.536-07:00Comments on The Neurocritic: More Friends on Facebook Does NOT Equal a Larger AmygdalaThe Neurocritichttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08010555869208208621noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21605329.post-51061169646253217762011-02-10T18:21:15.212-08:002011-02-10T18:21:15.212-08:00great article. 10/10great article. 10/10Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21605329.post-79689582944226700872011-01-10T10:19:05.433-08:002011-01-10T10:19:05.433-08:00Good point about the amygdala enlargement in autis...Good point about the amygdala enlargement in autism issue - not many people know that, or at least, not many people cite it...Neuroskeptichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06647064768789308157noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21605329.post-44437206669637728912011-01-08T09:24:32.996-08:002011-01-08T09:24:32.996-08:00As a person with autism, I have experienced first ...As a person with autism, I have experienced first hand what having social deficits is like. Amygdala size may have nothing to do with social deficits, but there is apparently evidence of defects in the amygdala (and other areas of the limbic system) in persons with autism, so there might be some sort of casual relationship. <br /><br />Have there been similar studies done on correlations between social networks and the pars opercularis and other mirror neuron areas and other areas of the frontal lobes? I wonder about that.jonathanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14972394536850151087noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21605329.post-59033425709196528402011-01-06T11:57:06.918-08:002011-01-06T11:57:06.918-08:00The notion that any one person could fulfill all 1...<i>The notion that any one person could fulfill all 12 social roles is absurd....Obviously, some of these are mutually exclusive.</i><br /><br />Is there an unspoken assumption that "child" must mean a person who is a legal minor rather than simply a person in relationship to at least one of their parents? If not, then none of the roles are mutually exclusive.R.http://mythmash.wordpress.com/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21605329.post-16840427970635912422011-01-06T10:59:09.092-08:002011-01-06T10:59:09.092-08:00Excellent post. Very well said and well researched...Excellent post. Very well said and well researched. Thank you for this. If nothing else, now I have a good place to point people to when I'm asked about this paper.bradley.voytek@gmail.comhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15705565128439299346noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21605329.post-53110030860311534332011-01-06T10:14:09.459-08:002011-01-06T10:14:09.459-08:00This is an very well-written deconstruction, the l...This is an very well-written deconstruction, the like of which I seldom read on blogs, although I think you are being a bit hard on the authors. <br /><br />This paragraph is particularly harsh, for a number of reasons:<br /><br /><i>First of all, the size of the amygdala has absolutely nothing to do with Facebook or any other contemporary social networking site. The scale for quantifying social network size and complexity was taken from a 1997 paper on Social Ties and Susceptibility to the Common Cold (Cohen et al., 1997), which in turn cited a book chapter from 1991. There was no such thing as Facebook or Myspace in 1997, only Geocities (1994) and Tripod.com (1995). As for the history of online communities, The WELL was launched in 1985 as a bulletin board system and could be considered as a proto-social networking site.</i><br /><br />- the authors didn't mention Facebook in the article at all. You can hardly blame other journalists or bloggers for putting two and two together, but you shouldn't repeat this error.<br /><br />- if you think that Cohen et al.'s (1997) measure is inappropriate, you should suggest a better alternative. I'm no expert but it's been cited a couple of hundred times, and recently. <br /><br />- But the first sentence is most telling: "the size of the amygdala has absolutely nothing to do with Facebook or any other contemporary social networking site". Besides the fact that the authors never claim such, it's pretty obvious from this sentence that you have prejudged this research from the beginning. Unless you've actually carried out a study, or can point to another study, which looked at Facebook and the amygdala, you cannot say this with any certainty at all.<br /><br /><br />This is a pity, because it seems to have distracted you from other problems with the paper, such as the size of the sample with respect to the ages of the participants (would have been better to simply stick with one age group). I am also unclear as to why so much material was left in the 'Supplementary' section, which is quite useful, especially with regard to the hippocampus. <br /><br />The suggestion that a person with a larger or more complex social network might have a different brain structure to someone with a smaller or simpler one is not really that controversial. However, while this paper has not, to my satisfaction clearly demonstrated that, neither has your post rebutted it.CiarĂ¡nhttp://www.ciaranmcmahon.ie/psychbooknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21605329.post-6471178029629051382011-01-06T08:06:28.721-08:002011-01-06T08:06:28.721-08:00Judging by the age range of the sample, and being ...Judging by the age range of the sample, and being familiar with this group's past work (Alzheimer's), I'm guessing these subjects were taken from the control group of an aging study. Makes you wonder how hypothesis-driven this study really was.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com