monkeysphere

First, though, I just wanted to say that it's 9am and weather.com reports that it's -17F (-27C) outside. I don't have proper attire for staying outside more than a few minutes. *brrrrrr* So why am I expanding my job search to include Alaska? *boggle* Anyway...

A monkeysphere is an interesting concept that I encountered this month. It's an idea that explains the limit, hardwired into our brains, to how many people we can care about in gut-wrenching fashion. It's not necessarily that people beyond that limit cease to matter at all, just that we stop caring so much.

"You see, monkey experts performed a monkey study a while back, and discovered that the size of the monkey's monkey brain determined the size of the monkey groups the monkeys formed. The bigger the brain, the bigger the little societies they built.

They cut up so many monkey brains, in fact, that they found they could actually take a brain they had never seen before and from it they could accurately predict what size tribes that species of creature formed.

Most monkeys operate in troupes of 50 or so. But somebody slipped them a slightly larger brain and they estimated the ideal group or society for this particular animal was about 150.

That brain, of course, was human."

So...

"The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people."

The article goes on to talk about the consequences to human society of this hardwired limit, from petty criminals to Osama Bin Laden. It seems that the monkeysphere also plays an important part in the anthropomorphism/ dehumanization issue that I'm also exploring.

I think it's unfortunate that humans requires groups larger than their monkeysphere in order to function effectively any more. I wish for a simpler lifestyle.

Mod +1: My urge to walk into the forest and not come back.