Meeting of the Minds

There's a scientific evidence that backs up the claim that we "click" with some people during a engaging conversation. Brain scans of a speaker and listener showed synchronizing during storytelling. So, there may be a neurological truth to the idea of being on the same wavelength. A special type of MRI device showed that speaking and listening used common rather than separate neural subsystems inside each brain. In fact, during a good conversation, people will unconsciously begin imitating each other, using similar sentence structures, speaking rates, and physical gestures and postures. Listeners can get so tuned in that they can even begin to anticipate what the speaker is about to say. Details are in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Stephen Goforth

How Many Friends

How many friends can you have? According to Dunbar’s number, the magic number is 150. Oxford University anthropologist Robin Dunbar says 150 is the most the brain can absorb. People within that circle had a personal relationship based on history and shared experience. He explains his reasoning in the book How Many Friends Does One Person Need? The first five are people you’d go to prison for. You wouldn’t do it for most of the next 10 but you would loan them $100. You’re less emotionally engaged with them. You might lend $20 to those in the next layer out, taking you to 50 people. The final 100 are folks you might do a favor for. Some researchers are using Dunbar’s number to determine how much storage is needed for mobile phone address books. Others are using it as a guide toward building the optimum organizational structure.

Stephen Goforth

Birds of a Feather

Two students in an MIT ethics and law class created a program that predicts whether someone is gay based only on their friend connections on Facebook. Our inner circle in some way defines us. If all your friends are over 30, you’re probably not a teenager. If all your friends attend similar churches or belong to the same political party, then you probably belong to the same religion or share the same political views.

A professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, discovered accurate predictions could be make about political affiliation based on music and group membership. But he also found just using Facebook friendship connections could also provide reliable results.

While it’s nothing new to predict who might be a terrorist, depressed or taking drugs by looking at who they hang around, only recently has so much information become available to make so many of those connections for so many people.

If social networks reveal who we are, then someone's personal information can be inadvertently shared online without realizing it. It highlights the risks of living online. Especially when potentially everything you ever do on the Internet will live forever.

Stephen Goforth