Monkeysphere

About

The monkeysphere theory is a hypothesis advanced by anthropologist Robin Dunbar which states that individual humans are limited in the number of meaningful social connections they can form; this number is known as Dunbar's number. In this hypothesis, the word "monkeysphere" is a sort of geometric metaphor for this limit; a more precise term might be "monkey horizon", meaning the social world our "monkey-brains" are capable of encompassing, with everything else being "over the horizon".

Notes

There does not seem to be much discussion about whether individual humans might have different-sized monkeyspheres (different Dunbar's numbers).

Links

Reference

• Wikipedia: redirects to Dunbar's number as of 2011-07-21