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Monkeysphere

Dootzkie Thursday, April 7, 2011
Hope ya enjoyed the first post about monkey experiments.
We are talking about primates, but I like the word monkeys more so I'll continue using it.

Now, I'm going to deliver the second one that one could consider as disturbing as the first one, but it's much more important then the status quo maintaining one.

Scientist have noticed that groups of monkeys, chimps in this case, almost never exceed fifty members. They also noticed that this patter on the limit of the size of the group appears in most of the other members of the monkeykind. One group of slightly sadistic scientists decided to test the relation of the size of the brain to the size of the group.
After a few dozen lobotomies they could see that monkeys would separate into smaller groups, and thus they concluded that the size of the brain does determine the size of the group of people you can socialize with properly. They named that group - The Monkeysphere.

Monkeysphere exists with humans and is thought to be limited that 150 people, on average. Does this mean you cannot name or know more then 150 people. Surelly not!

But can you tell me something more about that one person you waited with before the exam, or your neighbor, other then their name, sex, race and other generic info? For you, the cop that directs trafic, the woman in the grocey store or you teachers exist, but they are two dimensional beings. You are aware of them as you are aware of the birds and trees.

The people in the monkeysphere are 3D in your own eyes. They have hopes, fears and dreams, they have a familiy and geneology. You know them more personally and you know more of them rather then just generic things that are normal to share with almost anyone. These are all the things we are usually not aware of.
This always reminds me for a scene from "Reservoir dogs" where upon being asked if he killed any people Mr. NotSureWhatColour replies "No people, just two cops"

Plato had a father, Shakespear was in someones English class, Adriana Lima goes to the bathroom and the faceless companies couldn't function without the people that are working in them.

Expand your monkeysphere if you got spare room and always be aware that we are all human beings!

Be well

5 comments:

Niek said...

Very interesting post..

Nope said...

That's a good point you make. I think I will start trying to pay more attention to the people around me. I think if I task myself with knowing something special about everyone I meet for more than a second in my life, it would somehow be a positive thing.

Nate said...

I used to play a game with my dad: we'd start naming the positions that a hypothetical village would have to have filled by people in order to thrive (i.e. farmer, policeman, etc) and try to keep it as small as possible. And yep, it's around the 50-person limit, if you assume that people in a small society will inherently steer away from crime because they all know each other.

And shakespeare probably wasn't in an english class :)

Phillip J Fry said...

thats right, we're all human. Still animals though

Unknown said...

Very interesting post. And it's very true, we do tend to think of people outside our "monkeysphere", as you put it, as two-dimensional pseudo-people.

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