Robin Dunbar

What's so social about the social brain?

Primates have an unusual form of bonded sociality that imposes severe cognitive constraints on the size of social groups they can live in. Humans simply represent the limiting condition for this. Though we can live in very large political communities, in fact our social world is very small scale indeed. I will explore the way the human social world is structured, and the neurobiological and cognitive mechanisms that underpin it.