The Swollen Head

Adj. 1. swollen-headed – characteristic of false pride; having an exaggerated sense of self-importance; “a conceited fool”; “an attitude of self-conceited arrogance”; “an egotistical disregard of others”;

A friend who receives my blog posts by email everyday and occasionally visits them to comment on, insists that I must be the man with the most swollen head in his circle of friends. Since he claims to be afraid of what some of my fans will say, he insists on being anonymous for this post. I yield reluctantly.

Being a friend of long standing, he is aware of my wide network of offline friends and since I have started to write my weekly gratitude list, he has been coming across newer ones and he sees a lot of the commentators on my posts as my online friends. Thank God he has not included some of my FB and Linkedin friends in his reckoning.

He bases this conclusion on an article that he has sent me, that appeared in The Scientific American.

The particular paragraph that he says applies to me is this one:
“By comparing the differences between individuals and the size of their online network of friends, real-world friends, as well as the size of neocortical brain regions involved in social behavior, the researchers were able to identify a strong correlation between the volume of three neocortical regions and the number of that individual’s Facebook friends. Crucially, these brain regions (the right superior temporal sulcus, left middle temporal gyrus, and entorhinal cortex, areas previously implicated in social perception and associative memory) had no relationship to the real-world social networks of these individuals. There was only one area, the amygdala, that showed a correlation between gray matter density and both forms of social networking. The other brain regions seemed to be, quite literally, wired for the web.”

If he went to my Facebook wall and looked me up in Linkedin, I am sure that he will conclude that my head will explode.

Failure with my dieting has gone to my waist and success with my relationships has gone to my head! It is a double whammy alright.

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