ARE FACEBOOK USERS NARCISSISTS???
I don't really think so, not on the whole--and guess what, new research agrees:
"Last month, a study of 233 Facebook-using college students by researchers at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the University of Hartford took a different approach. Were the students primarily writing self-promoting status updates? Or were they interested in others, clicking “likes” and posting comments on friends’ pages? How many Facebook friends did they collect?
In addition to measuring narcissism (Do you like being the center of attention or blending in with the crowd?), the researchers also measured a student’s sense of privacy. (Do you share information with a wide circle of friends or value your privacy?) The researchers found, to their surprise, that frequency of Facebook use, whether it was for personal status updates or to connect with friends, was not associated with narcissism. Narcissism per se was associated with only one type of Facebook user — those who amassed unrealistically large numbers of Facebook friends.
Instead, frequent Facebook users were more likely to score high on “openness” and were less concerned about privacy. So what seems like self-promoting behavior may just reflect a generation growing up in the digital age, where information — including details about personal lives — flows freely and connects us.
“It’s a huge oversimplification to say Facebook is for narcissists,” said Lynne Kelly, director of the school of communication at the University of Hartford and one of the study’s authors. “You share information about yourself on Facebook as a way to maintain relationships.”
The social medium of choice for the self-absorbed appears to be Twitter. The researchers found an association between tweeting about oneself and high narcissism scores. That finding alone, I think, is worth tweeting about."

I'm sure there are some on FB who are self-centered narcissists, who love to be the center of attention and who falsely make their life sound uber-wonderful in order to attract more attention.

But a lot of people aren't like that; and in the end, Facebook is what _you_ choose to make it.  FB and the internet in general has been terrific for the Moebius Syndrome community, helping to connect us, to answer each others' questions and share experiences.

BRAIN TALK DEPT
A distracted mind can block pain signals; not a bad thing, maybe?  Read more:
"Mental diversions have long been known to make pain easier to handle, and new research suggests that's more than just a psychological phenomenon.
A study in Current Biology claims a distracted mind may actually stop pain from reaching the central nervous system by setting off the release of opioid-based chemicals in the body.
In the study, subjects were asked to complete either a hard or easy memory task while undergoing an fMRI. During the test, a painful level of heat was applied to their arms.
Study participants perceived less pain when they were concentrating on the harder of the two memory tasks -- and what they felt was reflected in the fMRI results.
The researchers at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf observed that the pain signals were blocked from reaching the spinal cord in the scans of the study subjects performing the more difficult task.
In a follow-up study, the researchers performed the same experiment but gave half of the participants an opioid-blocking drug called naloxone. They found that the pain-relieving effects of distraction dropped by 40 percent among participants who were given the drug.
The finding suggests distraction helps trigger a release of endogenous opioids -- or compounds like endorphins that are naturally produced in the body -- to kill the pain.
"The results demonstrate that this phenomenon is not just a psychological phenomenon, but an active neuronal mechanism reducing the amount of pain signals ascending from the spinal cord to higher-order brain regions," said lead author Christian Sprenger."


“In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current. ”--Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)