DUNBAR NUMBER IN THE TIMES OF COVID
This morning BBC Future had an article,
How solitude and isolation can affect your social skills.
Humans are deeply social creatures, so what happens when we’re alone for a long time?
While in the western countries there have been a lot of talk about Economic decline and unemployment and disruption in the school system and the disappearance of life as we knew it just few months ago, there has been very little talk about the Mental and Emotional Health of the country, individuals, children, society and the new normal has a new normal in behaviour of the individuals as well.
It was Sadhguru, a South Indian Mystic who pointed out that there would be a second pandemic: Mental Health and I can see it is already here.
I am an Endocrinologist and Anthropologist. While my travels around the world was curtailed drastically (down to zero), I have been pleasantly occupied counselling people around the world, not formal psychological consultation but offering subtle help in understanding small changes in their own behaviour or the behaviour of other people towards them.
So this BBC article was handy, and in time.
Despite the Covid Pandemic, the Dunbar Number is alive and well.
From the BBC
One explanation is that socialising is a mental workout. To successfully navigate an interaction with another human being, you need to keep in mind a surprisingly large amount of information – in addition to basic details like where they live and work, it’s helpful to recall the more nuanced features of their existence, such as their friends, rivalries, past indiscretions, social standing, and what motivates them. Many faux pas are down to slip-ups with these basic assumptions, like asking a recently-fired friend about their job, or complaining about children to a soon-to-be-parent.
In the end, the number of relationships we can maintain is limited by the amount of processing power we have available – and over millions of years, species with more social contacts tend to evolve larger their brains. It turns out this link works the other way around, too. In the short term, a lack of socialising can make them shrink.
Harari’s book 21 Questions for 21 Century is timely too.. The processing power of our brains is being overtaken by Artificial Intelligence.
Today I was having a discussion about the role of Primary Care Provider or the first person an ill person comes in contact with, who may soon become irrelevant, in that AI can process information much faster and far more accurately than the humans and direct them to the proper place or resource.
An ElectroCardiogram or ECG is a visible output in paper of the electrical functions of the heart. In many studies, AI had been better at coming at a correct conclusion than the Cardiologists.
While these points about AI is irrelevant to psychological dilemma during Covid, it is an example of available faster processing of information than human brain.
In selecting our friends and acquaintances, depending upon our personality , genetic and cultural upbringing, the processing capacity of our brains is of great importance.
This is where Dunbar number comes in
This comparative Anthropologist from the UK had devised the approximate capacity of our brains to have Lovers, Good Friends, Friends and Acquaintances. This has become more relevant in this age of aggrandising social media contact numbers. I personally know people who have 1000 social media friends but do not have a person to call and talk to.
I am beginning to see subtle changes in the behaviour of my colleagues and I feel the absence of friends and acquaintances.
Until the covid arrived, I took pride in the fact that in the course of the day, I could have multiple multicultural interaction of few seconds to few minutes in the course of the day.
My Uber driver could be a recent arrival from Venezuela, the American Airlines agents could be Jamaican or Haitian, then I go to TSA check where I can practice my Spanish with the immigrants from Latin America, onto the Flagship Lounge of the American Airlines where at last I come across some American transplants from the Midwest. I take pride in the cultural diversity of all places I visit: Miami, Paris, Brussels, Israel, Qatar…
I put into words a concept many many years ago: Transaction of symbols.
As humans, while we take pride in our national origins, race of our ancestors and our linguistic abilities, none of which matters when it comes to the practice of universal human civility. When I walk into the Marriott Hotel in Doha City Centre, Shiela at the front desk who can speak a Bisayan dialect comes to greet me warmly. We have only few minutes of interactions, she is checking me into the room and I ask her about her family back home and how she is keeping and when she is going home for holidays. Very pleasant exchange but worth more than its weight in gold !
Normally I would pass through Doha, the home of m favourite airlines, Qatar Airways, five times per year and it has been a full year since my last visit. I have met and talked to Indians, Keralites, Pakistanis, Nepalis, Bangladeshis, Sinhalese, Ceylon Muslims, Kirgiz, Syrian, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, Tunisians, Moroccans among others.
Transaction of Symbols is the correct interpretation of the image they are projecting and recognizing it and reinforcing it in the small amount of time made available.
Before we go on, we have to make a distinction between LONELINESS and SOLITUDE. Very few people would choose Loneliness but many choose Solitude and under the right circumstances Solitude can be productive.
For the first time, I see the line between Loneliness and Solitude blurring in that you are able to maintain contact with your close friends and acquaintances, the important aspect of physical contact is missing. Being a traveller on long distance journeys, I have the solitude but not loneliness.
Galle, Sri Lanka
From BBC
Research has shown that even when lonely people do have the opportunity to socialise, the feeling warps their perception of what’s going on. Ironically, this means that while it increases their yearning for social contact, it also impairs their ability to interact with others normally.
For example, people who feel isolated tend to have a heightened awareness of social threats – such as saying the wrong thing. They can easily fall into the trap of “confirmation bias”, in which they actively interpret the actions or words of others in a way that supports their negative outlook of their own status or social ability. By having low expectations of others and viewing themselves unfairly, they effectively invite people to treat them badly.
Lonely people must also run the gauntlet of an impaired ability to regulate their own thoughts, feelings and behaviour. This skill is critical to the ability to comply with social norms, and involves constantly analysing and modifying your behaviour in relation to other people’s expectations. Alarmingly, this process is usually automatic – and your capacity for self-regulation can be affected without you even noticing.
In this way, isolation can become a self-fulfilling prophecy known as “the loneliness loop”. It can lead to a toxic combination of low self-esteem, hostility, stress, pessimism and social anxiety – ultimately culminating in the isolated person distancing themselves from others even further. In a worst case scenario, loneliness can make people depressed, and a common symptom of depression is social withdrawal – again, not helpful.
Lets get back to the Dunbar Number. Even in the best of times, the number of people who you can all GOOD FRIENDS hover around 10, in my personal enquiries in various countries. I am reminded over and over again by people regardless of the country (Cuba exempted) that lucky is the person with 5 good friends. This is due to our ways of living and our political economical systems can be demonstrated by the social life in CUBA.. which I consider to be one of the best.. There the following observation, in Northern Ghana, may be applicable .
Indeed, social capital can be especially important for people who don’t have other forms of capital, as suggested by Acedo Carmona’s comparative research on northern Ghana and Oaxaca, Mexico. High biological diversity, remote mountainous settings, and the influences of Spanish colonialism on ethnic identities have all contributed to Oaxaca’s small trust circles, largely consisting of nuclear relatives. But northern Ghana’s scarcer environmental resources have made inter-ethnic cooperation and larger trust circles more important for survival. From BBC
from her paper:
In this paper, we want to contribute to the defense of social preferences by focusing on personal trust, a powerful psychological mechanism that can be seen, from an evolutionary point of view, as a way to solve social dilemmas by making one feel certain that our counterpart will be loyal and choose to cooperate and hence, making one feel committed to cooperate. This is achieved, neither by an external threat of punishment, nor by some sort of rule-enforcing authority, but by an affectively grounded, benevolent attitude towards the trusted person that is derived from previous interactions [13], [14]. In other words, personal trust puts one in a situation of risk of being exploited, while believing that one will not be exploited, because of the feeling that binds one with the counterpart. Therefore, it is a complex psychological state, which relates two people, with a previous story of positive interactions, and which involves both a cognitive and an affective dimension, and which gives rise to a pro-social attitude between them.
In Cuba, the larger trust circles are vital for survival. Due to scarcity bought on by ECONOMY (bad management) and POLITICS (The cruel BLOCKADE of Cuba by USA for 60 years). The fact that this is a local phenomenon can be shown by comparing to their compatriots in Miami (the immigrant Cubans who are not known for their cooperation).
(I do remember asking a friend of mine why so many people depend upon him to get chores done which he would do happily: he said. I AM TRUSTWORTHY)
I think the closest people in your DUNBAR circles will have this quality. TRUSTWORTHY and you have previous experiences with them.
So we have to take seriously the emotional aspects of this isolation which is forced upon us by this virus. Some people may be tempted to flout the rules and regulations knowing that it won't affect them, but to be a compassionate society (think Japan and the only European society that I can think, New Zealand), we have to look after the feeble and vulnerable in our societies, whether they are such for cultural, historic and social reasons.
In America, to get ahead, you need Education and also the capacity to generate wealth. Someone asked me the other day, Imagine what a Black Man faces to begin a business in this country. While Jamaican, Haitian and Cuban blacks had been endowed by their recent history of running their own affairs, when they come to the USA, they have an intrinsic sense of training to survive in the business world and many of whom do well in the business world in USA, but for an American black deprived of such luxuries and burdened with only memories of constant oppression, the weight to lift up is great indeed. This is the first time, an average American is confronting the fact that America is a racist country, it does not give equal opportunities to people of African Origin who have toiled centuries to make this country viable. Who rules this country is decided by the Black People of this country. because of their voting numbers but once the elections are over they are forgotten for another two years..
BBC had this wonderful story. (I no longer watch USA TV or News channels. BBC and Al Jazeera for Non Israeli news, they cover the non Arab world very well )
Mr Ansell was given the opportunity to live in a very isolated farm with an indefinite period which turned out to be 5 years. He had no electricity, no cellphone and all the five years he lived there NOT a single person passed by his isolated house.
Another thing Ansell noticed was that his identity had gradually started to slip away. “When you’re alone, you start to lose your sense of who you are, because you don't have an image of yourself reflected in the way that other people react to you. So I think to some extent, when I returned I had to rediscover who I could be in a social setting,” he says.
isolated farm house in Wales with no electricity or cellphone service
I think during this Covid Isolation many of us are forgetting the sense of who we are. Lucky are the people with a job, in which there is inbuilt protection and those for whom such protection is not available: employees of department stores or supermarkets. I notice that even with these people, who check our groceries and who make us coffee we have automatically adopted a new persona, social distance and no unwanted chatting (the spice of life for me).
Cherish the FRIENDS you have, not on your social media but flesh and blood contacts, we cannot hug and kiss each other like we used to but I remember a four year old Philosopher from Cote Sauvage said to me :
How can I miss you when I carry you in my heart all the time ?
So to my friends in Cuba, USA, Mexico, France, Israel, Spain, Latin America, India, Qatar, Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Australia..
I am grateful for your presence in my life.
I am confident enough to begin my journeys now..
The first one would be to return to CUBA.
I think it is only fit to dedicate this blog to the Petite poete de cote sauvage and the untiring and optimistic traveller, Carlos with his Panama Hat.
