
Your Brain Limits You to Just Five BFFs - thevibesman
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601369/your-brain-limits-you-to-just-five-bffs/
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lkrubner
How can this possibly be justified:

"To screen out business calls and casual calls, Dunbar and co include only
individuals who make reciprocated calls and focus on individuals who call at
least 100 other people."

I recall a recent joke about people who carry big book bags onto crowded New
York City subways: your book bag is not a gateway to a hyper dimensional space
outside of 3 dimensional reality, so please mind what you do with that damn
bag, because it takes up a lot of space.

Likewise, your business contacts take up a lot of space. They take time and
energy and brainpower, the very thing that would limit the number of people
that you can possibly keep track of. Therefore any attempt to exclude business
calls invalidates the results.

~~~
Retric
Many business calls are close to interpersonal content free. What are the
names of your coworkers children?

~~~
tbrownaw
I've actually _met_ my immediate non-remote coworkers' kids.

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thevibesman
This article reminded me of a scene from "Flight of the Conchords" where they
are discussion how many "the ones" you can have[1]---turns out it is 5.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZGc2sIajMM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZGc2sIajMM)

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PhantomGremlin
The article doesn't distinguish "friends" from "family".

In my experience they're totally different. Also, the more emotional energy
you expend with your family (e.g. dealing with teenagers), the less energy you
have left to interact with friends.

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peteforde
I was not thrilled by the reasoning presented here:

> The team also point out that 2007 is a good year to look for Dunbar layers
> because it predates the widespread use of smartphones and social networks
> like Facebook. These provide other avenues for social contact that would
> have made the study much harder.

That's not... a good thing to be bragging about if you're trying to make a
point.

First of all, this doesn't acknowledge that lots of people don't like talking
on the phone. Further, lots of the closeness that creates intimacy between
people can only happen in person. The more I like you, the less I want to
spend my time with you on the phone.

The huge problem is that by controlling for Facebook and smartphones, you're
ignoring the fact that those technologies have completely re-written the
communications story for our species in under a decade. Not to mention that
there's an entire generation that have come up at a time where texting and
Facebook have always been there, so to exclude these mediums renders all of
these conclusions not as analysis of how people communicate today but a record
of how some people used to communicate in a previous era. It's not useful,
it's cultural history.

The questions that are far more interesting now are around whether things like
social media have started to affect our capacity for meaningful relationships.
Surely while some of this stuff is biology, some of it was also a function of
it simply being harder to keep in contact with 1000 people before 2007 for
most people.

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dominotw
i don't think I have any friends anymore just a bunch of acquaintances.

~~~
lkrubner
How many? 100? 200? 300? Perhaps 1,000? According to the theory, you could
have more acquaintances if you have less friends.

~~~
peteforde
I can suggest that my own anecdotal experience confirms this. I've grown older
and "successful", currently feel like I have no close friends and 1000
friendly acquaintances.

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thevibesman
> The team also finds some evidence of an extra layer among some people. “This
> could, for example, mean introverts and extroverts have a different number
> of layers of friends,” they suggest. But interestingly, extroverts, while
> having more friends, still have a similar number of layers.

> In total, the study shows good evidence for the existence of the innermost
> and outermost layers but with some variability for the size of the
> intermediate layers. “The clustering yields results that match well with
> previous studies for the innermost and outermost layers, but for layers in
> between we observe large variability,” they say.

I was curious about those comments in the BBC article, so I took a look at the
paper and found this from the conclusions useful:

> While the data is noisy, all methods support two different groupings well.
> This could, for example, mean introverts and extroverts have a different
> number of layers of friends. Further work could investigate this
> possibility.

> Another suggestion is that over a year, friendships are more transient.
> Alters could move up or down from one layer to the next on a regular basis.
> This would reflect the temporal nature of emotional closeness, especially
> among one’s non-closest friends

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hydromet
How fascinating considering Facebook sends emails to those who have resigned
from Facebook, playing and preying on people's emotions with marketing
messages the likes of, "you may have more friends than you realize awaiting
you on Facebook", implying more is merrier and inducing the emotion of FOMO
(Fear Of Missing Out). Hmm, this is Zuckerberg's way of profiting off of
people's emotions eh?

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mouzogu
Five sounds about right to me. I remember something about a limit to the
number of telephone numbers we could recall from memory. It was in the the
same range. Not sure if there is any correlation. Although that actually might
be the number of consecutive digits we could recall easily from memory.

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ioab
Robin Dunbar's related book:

[http://amzn.com/0571253423](http://amzn.com/0571253423)

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pvaldes
Your brain limits you to just five real friends... and we together can stop
acronym abuse.

