According to people who know us better than we know our selves, we can't have more than about 150 friends.
Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, has conducted research revealing that while social networking sites allow us to maintain more relationships, the number of meaningful friendships is the same as it has been throughout history.
Dunbar developed a theory known as “Dunbar’s number” in the 1990s which claimed that the size of our neocortex — the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language — limits us to managing social circles of around 150 friends, no matter how sociable we are.
via Brains Can’t Handle All Our Facebook Friends, Can Manage 150 Friends Max « ResourceShelf
A couple of additional tidbits.
- Dunbar's research indicates that this number, 150, has held true for most of human existences and across multiple societies. Even though technology has allowed us greater contact and rich connections with many thousands of people, our brains haven't advanced very fast at all.
We might have invented sneakers that let us run 100 meters in 1.2 seconds, but our legs and feet can still only go at whatever rate that really fast guy can run.
- Dunbar's research seems to have held up, even as the pace of technological advances have accelerated. His findings on the neocortex were published in 1992 (draft here, final publication here.)
1 comment:
I vaguely recall some science fiction story that posited that the number of distinct people in the world was 137 and the rest was all done with mirrors. Not a bad subliminal guess (the stated motivation for the number in the story was that the reciprocal of the fine structure constant was the integer 137 - which may have been believed by some when the story was written, but is now known to be false: http://bit.ly/5c0ENL)
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