Years of Instagram use may quietly blur the brain’s sense of the body

Scrolling Instagram for an hour a day is ordinary for millions of people. So is the quiet awareness that doing it can skew how you feel about your face. That much researchers had documented years ago.

What nobody had tested was whether that skewing reaches past opinion – past the judgments people make about how they look – into the machinery the brain uses to recognize a face as its own.

For years, scientists studying social media zeroed in on body image – the way platforms push people to weigh their looks against a feed of polished strangers.

Heavier use tracks with body dissatisfaction and shaky self-esteem, as repeated research shows.

This team wanted to look past appearance. The study, led by Dr. Maria Sansoni at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, and coordinated by Professor Giuseppe Riva, who directs its Humane Technology Lab, asked whether screen time reaches deeper than vanity.

They call the idea the Digital Erosion of Bodily Identity. Years of seeing, editing, and comparing faces online, they argue, may slowly blur the perceptual lines that let the brain mark one face as uniquely its own.

Researchers recruited 95 young adults, including men and women, with an average age of 26. On paper they were ordinary users, reporting nearly eight years on Instagram and about an hour a day.

Before any headset went on, they filled in questionnaires about their bodies, their mood, and their habits on the app. They also counted their own heartbeats in silence, a standard test of interoception – how sharply someone senses signals from inside the body.

Then came the strange part. In one task, volunteers watched a stranger’s face in virtual reality while a brush stroked their real cheek and the on-screen cheek at once. In another, matching touches were applied to the stomach, paired with a virtual body.

These tricks belong to a family of body illusions neuroscientists have used for decades. The most famous is the rubber hand illusion, where a fake hand stroked in sync with a hidden real one starts to feel unmistakably like your own.

Those experiments work because the brain constantly stitches together what it sees, feels, and senses from within to decide where the body ends and the world begins. Feed it matching signals from the wrong place, and the boundary drifts.

How easily someone falls for one of these illusions reveals how firm those boundaries are. A solid sense of self resists the trick. A looser one gives way – taking the foreign hand, or face, as part of the self.

Here the numbers turned up something no one had seen before in healthy adults. More years on Instagram correlated with a stronger tendency to accept the stranger’s face as one’s own during the illusion. A clear dose-response effect, written in time.

What didn’t predict it is just as telling. Daily minutes on the app made no difference. The pull toward the stranger’s face tracked the length of someone’s history with Instagram, not how busy their feed was that week.

Where the slip landed gives it weight. Not anywhere on the body. Just the face – the one feature used to find yourself in a mirror and to be known by everyone else.

“It is through our faces that we recognize ourselves in the mirror, construct our individuality, and are recognized by others,” said Riva.

The drift had struck the part of the body most bound up with who a person is. Not some neutral limb.

None of this is settled. The sample was small, just 95 people, most of them White, European, and university-educated – room for the picture to change in a broader group.

Because the study caught everyone at a single moment, it can’t show the erosion unfolding over time. The handful who leaned on beauty filters felt more in control of the virtual body, but with just 12 of them, that thread is a lead, not a finding.

The face and full-body tasks used different setups, so they can’t be compared cleanly. Still, the work marks out fresh ground – including how the brain’s reading of internal signals, which one review identifies as a pillar of the bodily self, might bend under years of screen life. Whether the association reflects a biological shift in the brain, or some other pathway the study wasn’t designed to trace, remains an open question.

Strip away the caveats and one finding stands out as new. Until this study, no one had linked the years a person spends on an image-driven platform to a measurable loosening of how the brain claims its own face.

“The participants involved in the study belong to the first generation to grow up with social media,” said Sansoni.

The sharper worry, she adds, is the next wave – children meeting these platforms far younger and staying on them far longer.

Heavy social media use now carries a wider risk than the field assumed – not only how teenagers judge their looks, but how firmly their brains hold onto a self.

As screens reach children earlier, clinicians and researchers gain a new thing to watch: identity itself, alongside body image.

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