Combining Dynamic Network Analysis and Cerebral Carryover Effect to Evaluate the Impacts of Reading Social Media Posts and Science Fiction in the Natural State on the Human Brain.

Bo Hu,Guang-Bin Cui,Wen Wang,Qian Sun,Jing-Ting Sun,Ying Yu,Yu-Ling Cui,Lin-Feng Yan,Yu-Ting Li,Jing Zhang

doi:10.3389/fnins.2022.827396

Abstract

Social media has been associated with decreased attention, memory, and learning abilities; however, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Dynamic function network connectivity (dFNC) analysis is suitable for uncovering dynamical brain activity. Besides, the effects of a cognitive task may persist for a while on the brain, even after the termination of the task, also known as the carryover effect. Consequently, we combined the dFNC analysis and cerebral carryover effects to study the brain dynamics of reading social media posts in the natural state and comparatively investigated the brain dynamics of reading science fiction on the smartphone. We performed functional MRI (fMRI) scans of all subjects at baseline and then assigned them a social media post or science fiction reading task. Immediately after, another fMRI scanning was performed for these subjects. We found that the change between dFNC states, the number of dFNC states, and the total distances increased after reading science fiction. Furthermore, the global, local, and nodal efficiencies of the deep-thinking state tended to increase after reading science fiction. On reading social media posts, the functional connectivity (FC) between the default mode network (DMN) and bilateral frontoparietal network (FPN) decreased, while the FC between DMN and visual network (VN) increased. Given the current evidence, we concluded that reading science fiction could substantially increase brain activity and network efficiency, while social media was related to abnormal FCs between DMN, VN, and FPN.

Highlights

With the advances in the Internet, social media has become a pervasive component of our daily lives; Twitter and Facebook are the most used social networking sites (Kuss and Griffiths, 2017)
There were no significant differences in demographic parameters and smartphone habits among the three groups, except for the time spent on social media per day (P < 0.001)
State 4 was similar to state 1, except for the left frontoparietal network (LFPN) and the right frontoparietal network (RFPN), which were loosely connected with other networks

Summary

Introduction

With the advances in the Internet, social media has become a pervasive component of our daily lives; Twitter and Facebook are the most used social networking sites (Kuss and Griffiths, 2017). Brain activity when reading social media posts should be investigated to elucidate the underlying neural mechanisms causing these deficits (Meshi et al, 2015). Considering that the brain is in a dynamic state while reading social media posts, dFNC analysis is more suitable to study the dynamics of brain activity. This method is robust and has been verified in several previous studies, including those involving the migraines (Tu et al, 2019), autism (Li et al, 2020), and lower back pain (Tu et al, 2020). Brain activity of reading social media posts can be studied by combined fMRI and dFNC analyses

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