Are social skills in danger, in a hyper-connected world?

We are in contact with more conducting people today more social interactions and processing more information, on average-than would have been thought possible, through most of human history.

- Natasha Rego

How does this play into our sense of being overwhelmed? According to the social brain hypothesis, humans can, on average, maintain about 150 stable, meaningful relationships at a time. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and size of social group.

The size of the brain is a determiner "because a big chunk of our brain is required for social interactions", says Dunbar, now 77.

"It takes a lot more neural energy to analyse what's going on in someone else's mind: do they like you, do you like them? We're having to model our minds to match the state of these other people's minds." What does it do to the brain, then, to have hundreds of complex interactions a day? Excerpts from an interview.

What is it about social relationships that makes them so exhausting? We've shown with brain-imaging studies that the processing of social information is much more costly for the brain than processing just ordinary physical information, like navigating a street or deciding what to eat.

It takes a lot more neural energy to analyse what's going on in someone else's mind: do they like you, do you like them? We're having to model our minds to match the state of these other people's minds.

Aside from this, you have to keep investing in friendships, or they gradually decay.

In some ways, social media can actually act as a sort of sticking plaster, slowing down the rate of relationship decay.