Our brains are unable to cope with maintaining more that 150 friends on social network sites like Facebook, according to Oxford professor Robin Dunbar.
His findings show that the neocortex - the part of the brain that processes conscious thought and language - can only handle managing 150 friends, even if we're super-social.
If you have thousands of friends on networking sites, your behaviour apparently maintains a circle of about 150 people. However, Dunbar also discovered women found it easier to maintain friendship groups using just language.
The professor's work leads one to question the value of maintaining large circles of friends online. However, even if you were to have a group of 150 maintained friends, larger followings do allow you to pick up new business contacts, introduce new people into your friendship group and so on - that's valuable behaviour, as long as you don't fall into the trap of 'friendship anxiety' (worrying about how many social media followers you have).
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