Your Characters and the Monkeysphere…

[elfs]

The Dunbar Number is the upper limit on the number of other people with whom one can have interpersonal relationships.  This restriction is purely cognitive, a result of evolutionary pressures, and it tops out at about 150 people.  Robin Dunbar gave a great presentation on his work, and Cracked magazine has a brilliant exposition on it, calling it The Monkeysphere.  Dunbar’s number is all about relationships: the number we can maintain in our heads.  It’s about the same size as a human tribe before the invention of civilizations with uniform laws; it’s also the maximum size of most family’s Christmas card lists.

150 people seems to be the maximum number we can treat as people rather than as abstract human beings that need categorizing and simplification in order to manage.  Laws treat human beings simply, as categories rather than as people.  So do companies bigger than 150 people. We need these abstractions to marshall large numbers of people to accomplish things that require so many, but down inside our brains we’re still dealing with the same simple small number of real people.

One the things that occurred to me this morning is that writers might have their monkeysphere slots filled with their own characters.  This might be one of the reasons we’re all so famously isolationist and loner: our slots of friendship capability are limited to those not currently occupied by the characters that haunt our stories.  And I say this because I’ve recently felt as if Ken Shardik, Aaden, and P’nyssa haven’t been as much of my monkeysphere as the rest of the world.  Part of that is because they’ve been pushed out by circumstance: they don’t have twitter feeds and Facebook accounts, they’re not part of the rest of my family’s world.  I didn’t have to keep them away from Omaha, but the kids don’t need to know about them, so dealing with them is a bit like having an affair these days.  I have to go to cafe’s and long train rides to have long conversations with them, catch up on their lives, and push the stories forward.

There are, of course, exceptions: Jay Lake seems to have pretty solid characters and yet maintains a huge monkeysphere of friends.  A skilled politician often has a prodigious memorys and can glad-hand thousands of people, making each feel as if she is a member of his tribe at least long enough to vote for him.   I seem to have a less-than-well-endowed monkeysphere, myself.  It kinda bothers me, but I’m dealing.

So, if you’re a writer: do you believe that your characters take up treasured positions in your Dunbar number of friends?

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

Comments

Not sure I believe this

[(Anonymous)]

I'm always skeptical when someone comes out with a scientific study that is able to categorize "all people".

Everyone has a different metabolism, processes foods differently, absorbs medications at different rates. We know that some people have brains that are wired in such a way that they can memorize a page of text or a string of random digits just by glancing at it.

... And then we have this. Everyone is wired to top out at 150? Or would it be more realistic to say that ON AVERAGE folks top out at 150? I'd buy the latter. I'm betting that some folks can easily manage larger numbers, and some are stressed to handle more than 20.

More discussion on Dunbar Numbers: http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html

And by the by... good to bump into you again. I used to read your stuff back in the '90s, met you briefly at a Worldcon (Chicago 2000?), and just bumped into you again via Scott Edelman on Facebook... :)

Espirt d'escalier

[(Anonymous)]

Ah... Chris Allen said exactly what I was trying to say, only better, in a subsequent post: http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2005/02/dunbar_triage_t.html

... and it was Jay Lake who linked over, not Scott Edelman (which makes more sense).

... and this is Jeremy Bloom... :)

Re: Espirt d'escalier

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Dammit, that phrase, "esprit d'escalier," has been following me around all week. What's up with that?

Re: Not sure I believe this

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I think we can generalize a lot of "all people": "all people are incapable of reaching the moon without technological help," or "all people drown if their head is held underwater for more than ten minutes," and so on. The Dunbar number stands up to some pretty good scrutiny, but it is a point around which people cluster for a specific organizational need oriented about survival.

I've seen the studies that show that guilds and such top out around 60; this suggests to me that we reserve the rest for something else. Also, 60 has a high "voluntary" point; we don't seem to voluntarily join groups bigger than that without a smaller, "in group" identity to which we can subscribe.

[wordsmith101.livejournal.com]

"...writers might have their monkeysphere slots filled with their own characters..."

I don't know if this is true, but it does make a kind of sense to me. Also, it means that it's not that I don't have a huge number of friends...it's just that some of them are imaginary. I can live with that. :)

[invisogoth.livejournal.com]

Without going into the validity of Dunbar's thesis, to answer your question, do your characters take up Dunbar slots? My answer would be, not so much. At times they certainly do take up *attention* but so do the people one does anything with. :)

[trinsf.livejournal.com]

Hey, btw, and unrelatedly, I was at Loscon this weekend and the Program Director for Further Confusion was explaining about not knowing any writers and having to rely on one publisher to supply names for writers he could invite as guests, and I said, "Well, of course, Elf Sternberg" and he didn't know who I meant, but other people in the room did. (*deep breath*) So, I told him to Just Fucking Google you, because I couldn't be certain I remembered your email address off hand. I realize that it's unlikely that you can attend FurCon because you have a family and I told him that, but if you get contacted, that's why, and I'm the person who suggested you. If you were coming to FurCon, I might even attend. :-)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Oh, hai! For some reason, I missed this the first time through. Thanks for suggesting me. Yeah, I can't do much 'conning this year between the two kids and the no job things. But still, I appreciate the thought.

[(Anonymous)]

Mm. Some of my friends are so close by that they take up a large segment of my monkeysphere. Characters are a few rows back.


/ RL from rasfc, hi /

[amythis.livejournal.com]

Short answer, hell yes. But I'm an extreme example of a hermit writer, and have been since about age 10.

[maellenkleth]

short answer also: concur with the general principle, but in specific find that for long-term stability n = 50 to 70.