Social Networking & Dunbar's Number
My Facebook friends list has reached close to 140 (give or take 3 pending requests). One of persistent thought I have been having for past few days is the fact that the number of people in my social network is close to Dunbar’s number (148 appx) – my neocortex limit for maintaining stable relationship Dunbar's number (also known as the Dunbar number or the Monkeysphere) is a value significant in sociology and anthropology. Proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, it measures the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships". Dunbar theorizes that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained." You could read more about Dunbar’s number at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_nu