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Being a social butterfly just might change your brain: In people with a large network of friends and excellent social skills, certain brain regions are bigger and _______ connected than in people with fewer friends, a new study finds.

The research suggests a _______ between social interactions and brain structure. “We’re interested in how your brain is able to allow you to _______ the right way in complex social environments,” Mary Ann Noonan said, a neuroscientist (神经学家) at Oxford University. Studies in monkeys have shown that brain areas involved in face processing and in predicting the _______ of others are larger in animals living in large social groups than in ones living in smaller groups.

To investigate these brain _______ in humans, Noonan and her colleagues found 18 participants for a structural brain-imaging study. They asked people how many _______ they had experienced in the past month, in order to determine the size of their social networks. As was the case in monkeys, some brain areas were _______ and better connected in people with larger social networks. “These different brain regions are all singing _______ songs,” Noonan said. “ _______ areas are all singing the same song, and when they’re connected better, they’re singing more harmoniously with each other.”

The researchers also tested whether the size of a person’s social network was connected with ________ in white-matter pathways, the nerve fibers (纤维) that connect different brain regions. ________ , they found that white-matter pathways were better connected in people with bigger social networks. “The nerves were more like a Los Angeles freeway than a ________ road,” Noonan said.

The researchers couldn’t say whether social interaction ________ these changes in brain structure and connectivity, or whether the brain determined how social someone was. In the case of the monkeys, the researchers asked and wrote down the size of the animals’ social network, so they ________ that social-group size was causing the brain differences. It can be inferred that a similar process takes place in human brains, but to prove the ________ , long-term studies are needed, Noonan told Live Science.