Dunbar's Number

You can feel it starting to happen again. The name is something really common.. Sandra? Susan?

Does it start with an S at all? Sharon?

You’ve seen this face before, but you can’t quite put your finger on who it is, or who they are to you.

Running into someone “in the wild”, without context, does this to me from time to time. I will see someone and recognize their face, but that’s just about all the information I have on that person at the moment.

In 1993, Robin Dunbar set out to explain why.

Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows each person and how each person relates to every other person.

That number is 150, according to Dunbar's theory.

On a personal level, this number really checks out! At Revolution BJJ, we have somewhere around 410 students right now. I remember a time when I knew everyone’s name in the gym, when it was essentially a giv…