Robin Dunbar

And so we only have enough space in our heads and enough time in our day to groom a limited number of people.

And so, you know, Robin Dunbar, the great English anthropologist and primatologist says that we can have about 150 friends, about 500 acquaintances.

We can have 50 really close friends.

We can have maybe 15 friends.

That's interesting in itself because endorphins really are a pain reliever.

But what I learned from Professor Robin Dunbar at Oxford is that endorphins also provide mental relief.

They calm our fear center.

They give us a sense of well-being elation.

And this makes sense with hundreds of studies that now show that exercise is an effective antidepressant, which I think can also help us understand why, why, why.

why why we keep breaking that world record for marathon participation like everyone you know really is running a marathon now but so endorphins um that's what endorphins do they give us that high that's the runner's high but there's something else that happens with endorphins a few things and one of them comes from the rower's high, lesser known.

This came out of Robin Dunbar's lab.

They tested professional rowers on rowing machines, like in a lab.

It's an evolutionary feature.

I was doing some research and psychologists like Robin Dunbar point out that gossip replaced physical grooming when our ancestors' tribes grew too big to pick bugs off of each other.

It doesn't come from our lizard brain, as I thought, but from our highly evolved social brain trying to build trust.

seek personal validation, and figure out who is safe in the tribe.

And close friends are by necessity fewer than casual friends and acquaintances.

The Oxford professor Robin Dunbar is famous for saying, we can sustain 150 casual relationships, but only five very close emotionally supportive relationships.

Now, the number of deep relationships someone can sustain will be different from person to person.

But the point is that this biblical friend, it's in the singular, it's rarer.

They covenanted and committed to be faithful to one another.

Their friendship makes most modern blokes blush.

Carl Dienick, an Australian writer and Bible college professor, blogged about this online.

He said, I've been working my way through Richard Godbeer's fascinating and unusual The Overflowing of Friendships, a book that he's been reading.

Pursuing this kind of friendship does more than just quell our loneliness.

According to Oxford University's resident expert in this, Robin Dunbar, friendship is not just a factor, no, no, no.

Friendship is the factor influencing our health, well-being, and happiness.

We need to change the story on this one.

So preferential attachment to me, it's good and bad news, right? So the bad news is that not all networks are created equally.

There is not, despite what Robin Dunbar and the 150 people, et cetera, that applies to sort of keeping tabs on close relationships.

But in terms of sheer number of contacts, it's not a normative distribution.

It's a power law.