I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear and Vivit, conversations about connecting and communicating.

Your psychological health and wellbeing, physical health and wellbeing and even how long

you're going to live is best predicted by the number and quality of close friendships

you have. It's not all friendships, it's this little core in the centre of round about

five kind of best friends and family. The number you have in that inner circle and the

quality of those friendships is a very, very strong predictor, both your psychological

and physical health and wellbeing. It's quite extraordinary, you know.

That's Robin Dunbar. His research over the last 20 years hasn't just found the number

five for the number of friends that are important to your wellbeing. He's also figured out

the total number of friends you can have meaningful relationships with and that number 150

has become a meme known now as Dunbar's number. This is going to be great. I've never

interviewed anybody who had their own number before. I've had a tarantula named after

me but never a number. That's a rancelera. Dunbar's number. Tell me what Dunbar's number

is. I might preface that by saying that somebody did point out that there are only about

10 people who have had numbers named after them and most of them are already dead. So this

is kind of bad news. So what's Dunbar's number? Dunbar's number is the limits on the number

of friends and family that you can have meaningful relationships with and this is characteristic

of all monkeys and eggs but obviously the actual number of the size varies with the species.

So humans having a much bigger brain have bigger numbers and that's because the typical

size of social group for a species is simply a consequence of the size of the brain that

the species has or to be more specific. The big chunk at the front does all the management

of our relationships. That's the key thing. So the bigger that chunk in the front is the

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