Month: August 2019

You’re Crashing, But You’re No Wave…

Whilst there are those of us who look at dreams from a spiritual perspective the team here tend to look at them from the Psychological aspect. We thought since everyone dreams, despite the fact that over 80% of people don’t remember dreaming or more than 5% of their dreams, that we throw on a nightcap and sleeping gown to explore the dream state and look at the psychology behind them. If we have time we might get some spiritual mumbo jumbo for everyone to have a look at, you know to give you both sides of the proverbial coin. Clearly we’ve landed on the psychological side of the coin having watched it spin through the air for several years. Yes there are still things that science can’t explain but for most things there is a logical explanation available.

For the rest though there is always the whack job conspiracy theorist to help brighten up our days. Forward to dreamland we march. We would have liked to do an immersion study into Dreams however someone had to stay awake in order to write this blog for you. A screen full of Zzzz’s whilst looking quite interesting isn’t a very good read, last time we checked. So where does one start a dream blog and what is the appropriate response when someone asks you to interpret their dreams? Hopefully we’ll be able to answer that for you and more in the coming paragraphs. And if not well at least we’ve managed to somewhat entertain you for a couple of minutes with or unique blend of silly fact driven dribble.

Well firstly they say you learn something new everyday and if you haven’t for the day we’ll share with you what we just learnt. The study of dreams, more importantly the scientific study of dreams has its own name. Yep it’s got a scientific term, Oneirology (pronounced On-ear-ology, well at least that’s what the lady on youtube sounded like) which, yeah means the scientific study of dreams. So if you didn’t already know that you now do and potentially learnt something new for the day. Don’t say we’ve never taught you anything here at A Mind of Its Own. After all, sharing is caring as they say and we are all about educating our readers and promoting discussion of our topics. What is knowledge they say? That’s right its power!

According to reputable online forum Psychology Today, the most important scientific findings about dreams can be summarized into 9 key points. They could have made it an even number it would of looked a little tidier. Before we go into those though maybe we should answer the main question burning in our little brains. What is a dream? Well according to the not so reputable website where a lot of university students go to get their information these days. Wikipedia. A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Why we dream is a little harder to explain and is not yet fully understood from a scientific standpoint. But it hasn’t stopped the shrinks around the globe coming up with theories around dreams and we’ll cover some of these off a little later.

The catalyst for the blog was a conversation with one of our close friends who has had some weird dreams and well the team being who they are the research light bulb sparked and we thought we’d try and help everyone understand why they dream and how dreams happen, why we dream what we dream. So the team will embark on a journey through the synapses to understand the how, what, where and why of it all. After all the whole premise of this here blog to answer questions and create conversation isn’t? Or are we just writing for the fun of it and people have slowly started to join in and read the rubbish that gets post each week while they are sitting on the can voiding their bowels?

A little graphic from the writers but we are trying to paint a picture here and speaking of pictures did you know that not everyone dreams in colour? Studies have found that people who predominantly grew up watching black and white TV tend to dream in black white, what colours they do see are said to represent feelings. Those who grew up in the 21st century tend to dream in colour and rarely have black and white dreams or colours that represent feelings. Speaking of thoughts and feelings it is believed and scientists are working on proving it that you dream when your thoughts and memories are being reorganised. You also tend to express your hidden desires when you dream. Your mental schema is also modified when you dream. Most dreams we witness things happening through visual or auditory perception.

And yeah someone asked the question Do Blind people dream? Silly of course they do, their dreams are more auditory than visual and they images they “see” have been described as a blur or non-existant or even created from their memories that have been built with touch and sound. It made us wonder whether someone could input images into a blind person minds and they would then know what a lot of things look like and be able to experience and see colours for the first time. Science has no doubt had a few things in the pipeline for years, heck he CIA used to experiment with mind altering drugs in the 70’s. It’s not a far leap to think they may have started experiments to make the blind see and experience in their dreams.

For those of you who wish to understand the meaning of your dreams well that’s dependant on what you link your dream images to and how you wish to interpret them altogether. There is no science behind how to interpret your dreams it is purely up to the individual to work out their own dreams. The surprising fact that has been scientifically proven is that the average person spends around six whole years of their lives dreaming, on average that’s two hours per night. Early studies led to the belief that we only dream during the earliest phases of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. However, more recent studies have shown that we dream through all the various sleep phases. When it comes to remembering our dreams though that’s where the lightest REM phase comes into play. According to scientists anyway and we tend to trust those guys given they do these studies for a living.

The anatomy of the sleep cycle is actually quite interesting and helps to explain why we remember dreams during the various phases of REM and NREM (Non-Rapid Eye Movement). Over the course of the night the body goes through the five stages of sleep 4-6 times spending an average of 90 minutes in each stage. As we spend so much of our lives sleeping it’s no wonder that we dream and dream often. It’s our dreams that can inspire others or lead us to individual greatness. They say dream big, or to go big or go home and well we have to agree with them. Whilst dreams are often our subconscious coming through and pulling with it the things we want and need in our lives.

Ok now that we know sleep is broken down into 5 phases or four phases depending on which school of thought you come from, we now know we dream throughout those 5 or 4 phases. We can now take a deeper look into the breakdown and psychology of our dreams. Yes we’ll try to answer the questions for you as to whether your dreams are a presentation of the future, past of present, our just our hopes and dreams playing out in the dreamstate? Hopefully we can answer that for you in the next couple of paragraphs before you fall asleep and start dreaming about the day we write a blog that keeps you awake and doesn’t bore you to sleep. We are kidding we know you can’t stop once you pick up our blog each week.

Ok so we thought the best way to do this would be to pick out some facts that have been scientifically proven, queue the anti-vaxxers, flat earthers and conspiracy theorists to argue the point just because they can and they will. They are a little like a mosquito flying around your room when you are trying to sleep. Ok, we kid, we kid they are ok and they are entitled to their opinions, even if they go against science. So some of this we have covered already above and some of it is new to us but we thought we’d give you some of the psychological effects and reasons behind our dreams. We picked thirteen to be annoying and because the boss keeps telling us that everything has to be an even number and it’s annoying us.

1. In Our Dreams, We Only See Faces That We Know

When you first hear this fact, you might think it surely doesn’t sound right… But in our dreams, the faces we see are faces that we know! Experts insist that our brains cannot invent new faces to feature in our dreams. This means that any face we see in our dreams is one we’ve seen before. This doesn’t mean that you personally know that person. Since most of us encounter “extras” in our dreams, this information may come as a surprise.

However, consider that we constantly encounter faces that we don’t necessarily log as important. So, a newsreader on a TV segment and a stranger on your commute to work can feature in your later dreams, and we may not recognise them as people we’ve already seen.

Most of the major players in our dreams are likely to be people we know quite well, or at least used to know. In some cases, our brains can also present a strange hybrid of people we know and those we don’t. For example, you might believe you’re interacting with an old friend in a dream, and their personality may fit perfectly. However, when you wake up you, might suddenly notice that they were “played” by a person with a different face, sometimes someone you’ve only encountered in passing.

2. Not Everybody Dreams In Colour

Surprisingly, not everyone dreams in color. In fact, a full 12% of sighted people will dream in black and white. Studies which were conducted from 1915 to the 1950’s supported that a majority of dreams had been in black and white. However, after the 1960’s the numbers did shift over to color. Further, the number of people who dream in black and white is dropping as the years’ pass. Research suggests that this could be linked to the fact that this was around the time that TV switched from black and white to color, so there may be a correlation.

3. Your Mind Is More Active During a Dream Than When You’re Awake

Most of us associate the idea of sleep with a slowing down of the mind and body. This makes sense, given that being asleep is all about resting, recharging and getting ready for a new day. Plus, a good sleep is profoundly relaxing and refreshing, giving you the impression you’re your brain has been working more slowly. However, don’t assume that your mind is less active during dreams. In fact, it’s more active then than it is when you’re awake! You can see this in the concrete data provided by sleep studies that track electrical activity in the brain. The above fact may not make sense to you at first glance, but it has a lot to do with the variety and significance of waking life. This appears to be because your brain is busy learning from what you did over the preceding hours, processing problems that remain, and making sense of everything you’ve seen and felt during the day. Some research hints that the brain is even more active during sleep when you’ve had a novel experience in the last 24 hours, or when you’ve been through a major change of some sort, whether positive or negative.

4. Animals Dream Too

Have you ever noticed that when your pet is asleep, they sometimes make noises, or twitch their paws as though they are running? This is because animals also dream. Studies have been conducted which showed that when animals are in the REM stage of sleep, they all show the same brain waves as we do when we are dreaming. The studies have included chimps, dolphins, dogs, and cats. It’s fair to speculate that most mammals (at the very least) dream, just like we do. This means that they can also be unsettled by their experiences of dreams. So, keep an eye on your pet after sleep to make sure they aren’t feeling out of sorts after a nightmare. We can all relate to that feeling of discomfort and disorientation after a dream!

5. Blind People Can Also Dream

It’s not only people who can see that can dream. Blind people can also dream. Those who had become blind after birth can still see in their dreams, however, those who have been born blind cannot see in their dreams. Those who cannot see in their dreams, still experience dreams in a different way: through smell, sound, touch and other senses.

6. Dreams Speak Through Our Subconscious

Now, if you’re like most people, you’ve probably wondered “What do dreams mean when you dream about someone specific?”. As mentioned at the outset, there’s still a prominent school of thought according to which dreaming of someone or something can tell you something useful about how you feel, and about what you want from life. So, what does it mean when you dream of someone repeatedly? Psychological facts about dreams of someone suggest that it can indicate a range of things. In some cases, you repeatedly dream about someone because you care a lot about them and have some kind of unresolved issues with them. This could be a romantic interest, or it could be about losing touch with an old friend. It could just as easily indicate an ongoing conflict under the surface of your dynamic with a family member.

7. Dreams Are Often Forgotten

Everyone has dreams when they sleep, it’s just that a lot of us don’t remember them when we wake up. It is simply not easy to hold onto the bulk of the content of your dreams. Up to 60% of people do not remember their dreams at all, especially after the first 5 minutes of waking up. In addition, for the average person, 90% of the details from dreams have vanished within a mere ten minutes. This means you can really only remember a fraction of your dreams. The exception to this is if something ways you during the rapid eye movement stage of your dreams (i.e. REM sleep). When this happens, you’re typically more capable of recalling dream information. The downside is that you will also feel startled, and will miss out on one of the most important, healing parts of the sleep process. Of course, dreams are also more likely to stick with you if they repeat or have emotional resonance. However, if you have a general interest in remembering dreams, try keeping a notepad by your bed and noting down an outline as soon as you wake. This means you can regularly come back to your dreams and see if you notice overlapping themes or can figure out any potential messages from your subconscious mind.

8. Sleep Paralysis

Sleep paralysis is where you have a temporary inability to move or speak. This can occur either when you are waking up or when you are falling asleep. Most people will experience sleep paralysis once or twice in their life, whilst others can experience it more regularly.

Sleep paralysis does not feel like you are in a dream, it feels real. Some people have said that during their experience, they feel a sensation that someone or something is in the room with them. Sleep Paralysis normally lasts from a few seconds to several minutes.

9. Some Dreams Could Be Premonitions

There have been some cases where people have claimed to have dreamt things that turned out to actually happen later. Some say it is coincidence, while others say they can see the future and experience premonitions. The cases recorded include: Abraham Lincoln dreaming of his assassination, many victims of the 9/11 had dreams warning them, and there have also been 19 verified precognitive dreams about the Titanic, to name a few.

10. You Can Act Out Your Dreams When Sleepwalking (And Worse!)

Sleepwalking is known as an extreme form of REM sleep disorder. For some, sleepwalking can be mild and for others, more serious. Some cases could be where you walk around your room or talk to others, whilst sleeping. However, there have been cases where people have left their homes, or drawn gorgeous paintings that they cannot paint when they are awake.

11. Dreams Recharge Your Creativity

You may have thought that apart from any subconscious messages they contain, dreams must be quite useless. That’s not so much the case. They can actually improve your performance in seemingly unrelated areas of your everyday life. According to research reported by the American Psychological Society on the psychology of dreams, they work wonders for your creative faculties in particular. If you’re an artist, you might have already spotted this, but the type of creativity we’re talking about here also applies to things like creative problem-solving. Apparently, this is because the process of dreaming is a lot like using your imagination to be creative. When your brain analyses and tackles problems during your sleep, it’s activity parallels that witnessed when you’re being creative in waking life. This means that no matter what your preferred artistic mode of expression might be, you’re likely to be better at it after a night of vivid dreaming. And, as a bonus, you may find direct inspiration in your dreams. For example, if you dream about a fantastical scenario, go through a challenging experience or revisit a moving aspect of your past, this can help you “tune into” the types of intense emotions that boost creative output.

12. Men And Women Dream Differently

When women dream there are normally an almost equal amount of both men and women that are involved in their dreams. However, for men, around 70% of the people in their dreams are other men. As well as this, men have been known to have more aggressive dreams than women too. Women also tend to have slightly longer dreams.

13. 50% Of Dreams Are Negative

Research has found that most dreams include negative emotions. 50% of all dreams are normally negative. In a study that was conducted, the common emotions that people experienced during their dreams were sadness, anger, fear, and anxiety.

So we aren’t too sure as to whether we answered any questions or all questions or just wasted a lot of our time and your time this week as we dreamed away 5 pages of what would no doubt be some of the most boring material we have come up with to date. The adventure into dreamland wasn’t as exciting as we had hoped it was even a little mind numbing and boring to us which is probably why it took so long to write and edit. That and we’ve actually been busy at the job that pays the bills so we thought rather than getting sacked and sitting around coffee shops all day writing books and blogs we should make some actual money and stop eating two minute noodles. Ok to be the struggling writer when you have nothing to actually do but it’s not ok when you have a job that pays you quite well.

Anyway that’s enough from us for another week, we’ll leave you in peace and wish you a fond farewell until the next piece of literary genius hits your inbox and dances across your screen like a burlesque dancer at a show on a friday night in northern siberia. Like always we’ll love you and leave you, thanks for being the ever faithful fans and supporting us like you have from day one on this amazing journey into the blogosphere. Yeah we just dropped blogosphere after saying we never would. And on that note we’ve been A Mind of Its Own and it’s been our pleasure have a good day or night wherever you may be.

Timberwolves at New Jersey…

It’s funny how people will come in and out of your life. They drift from one Dunbar number to next and often back and forth between the various different social groups in your life. If you are wondering what we are talking about you’ll need to go back to last weeks post and have a read. But it does help us lead into this weeks A Mind of Its Own, yep plug an old piece and get a segway into this weeks blog well played by us. Anyway, we used to have a mate and this week’s blog goes out to him. Yep we had a mate just one! I’d say he sat most of the time in between our clan and tribe level on the Dunbar matrix. He was never a really good close mate that we’d confide in but someone that we hang out with on regular occasion when we were younger.

We’ll call him Abe because it was the worst name we could come up with and he was often a bit of a knob to people in his younger immature years but who wasn’t right? Abe had this argument he’d bring up whenever he’d had a couple of beers and was well on his way to being obnoxious and annoying. The argument we’ve presented before but we’ve never really gone into detail and explained the why or how. So the premise of the argument is that it’s not a sport unless it involves a ball. Over the years it has provided hours of fun and conversation around the pub, club or bar as people try to disprove the theory that it’s not a sport unless it involves a ball.

Already the cogs are ticking away in your head as you think about so called ‘sports’ that don’t involve a ball. It’s at this point that obnoxious Abe would start shooting down peoples suggestions of sports left, right and centre. Like a gunslinger from the wild west he was first to draw and quick to blow a hole in his challengers arguments no matter how good a point they made that their sport was indeed a sport. It’s usually a lot of the individual sports that were the first to be shot down in flames. From there things progressed to some team based sports that even as sensible human beings we struggled to comprehend how they had become sports. But if it can be commercialised you can guarantee our allies in the US of A will have turned it into a money making scheme.

According to the definition, A sport is an activity that is competitive and athletic, and which requires some particular set of skills or physical abilities to be carried out. But good old Abe could never be swayed on his sports stance. The man even had a book planned but quickly gave up on the idea when he realised the title “Balls and All” was already taken and that he’d actually have to write it himself.

So what’s a sport, well the following is a list of some sports according to Abe:

  • Baseball
  • Basketball
  • Volleyball
  • Dodgeball
  • Football (Soccer, Gridiron, AFL, Rugby Union, Rugby League)
  • Tennis (Including Table)
  • Quidditch
  • Lawn Bowls
  • Lacrosse
  • Polo
  • Field Hockey
  • Bowling
  • Billiards
  • Cricket

The list goes on and there are so many derivatives of sports that we could literally list pages upon pages of them. But we aren’t here to talk about what is a sport we want to focus on what isn’t. If it doesn’t involve a ball it’s not a sport, plain and simple. What’s that athletics is a sport? No sorry it isn’t athletics is a bunch of life skills we all need and here is why. In the wild you need to be able to run away from big game so running is not a sport. Huddles is not a sport, when you are running away from the police you need to be able to leap over fences without stopping and high jump well that’s just even bigger fences. Javelin you say, nope another life skills that’s just hunting skills. Discus is just a heavy frisby, the only two athletics events that are actual sports are shot put and hammer throw. Yes the hammer is a ball on a chain a little like paddle tennis in your backyard.

Swimming is also not a sport and the most easy to argue. If you don’t swim you drown! It’s really a no brainer. Most water sports fall into the it’s not a sport category and can be classified as recreation activities. That includes synchronised swimming, diving, fishing, surfing, water skiing, wakeboarding or water pistol fights. Boxing, MMA, wrestling and any of the martial arts are not sports they are additional survival skills you may one day need when and if the zombie apocalypse comes or your country is invaded. Horse racing, motor racing and boat racing are not sports either they are activities, recreational or otherwise and none of them involve a ball unless its car soccer that’s a sport. The prevalent rise of gaming is also another recreational activity that is not a sport even if you are playing a sport on the screen.

We then move on to all the adventure sports like rock climbing, base jumping, hang gliding, street luge, white water rafting or kayaking, snowboarding, skiing, mountain biking, kite surfing and anything else that has a high likelihood of injury are all not sports. Rock climbing like tree climbing is something you did when you were a kid, cliff diving with or without a parachute is just silly. Laying on a skateboard and flying down a hill is also not a sport and something you did when you were 12 years old. The rest all just fall into recreational activities or modes of transportation.

Then there are those sports that just become questionable like hockey, played on the field it’s a sport, on ice the argument becomes a little dodgy as it’s a puck and not a ball however many a bar brawl has almost started over this one and apparently it is a sport because the ball was originally used however some genius came up with the idea to slice it in half as it travelled better over the ice. Over the years the ball was just flattened down into the puck we now know. So Abe’s argument on this one is that it’s just a squashed ball. Badminton is another questionable sport but again it’s a ball shaped object with wings a little like the golden snitch from the Harry Potter invented game of Quidditch, which has geeks running around on broomsticks across ovals all around the globe.

Anything that requires firing a weapon that was once used to kill other humans can not be classified as a sport on the premise that if it kills it’s not a sport. Archery, shooting, ice skating are all hunting skills and help put food on the fire when the world goes to shit or you just don’t have time to make it to Coles or Woolworths. Like fishing is not a sport, if you don’t catch a fish you don’t eat. What’s the saying ‘Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime’ It’s a part of the survival skill set that we all need to have in our lives. Heck you can combine it with as many other activities as you like and it still doesn’t make it a sport, yeah we are calling you out Biathlon, skiing and shooting has been done to hunt and kill in snow covered countries for centuries that doesn’t make it sport.

Dancing is something that you do in nightclub and therefore is not a sport even when you add ribbons or some batons and call it rhythmic gymnastics. Even when you throw in a pole and the man or woman does some acrobatic stuff on the pole and gets paid money to do so, it’s not a sport despite the guy having balls. And there’s another group of activities that aren’t sports. Gymnastics isn’t a sport either, except for that one floor event where they throw the bowling ball around that’s a sport. The balance beam, rings, uneven bars, trampoline and other floor events are all things that belong in a circus or a children’s jungle gym. Some of those skills could be used for survival though. Another so called sport to rise over the past decade is CrossFit and even the smart people here at A Mind of Its Own question whether that’s a sport.

We’ve decided that CrossFit is not a sport unless there is a medicine ball carrying event that is the only portion of this so called sport that is actually a sport. The rest is a bunch of fitness fanatics jumping over boxes, lifting weights, climbing ropes and doing all the things the military seem to do. To take it one step further it’s not a sport but do people try and classify bodybuilding as a sport? We know there is a lot of doping in professional sports but professional modeling competitions where you need to look like a triangle seems to have more Anabolic Steroids than the Bombers medical unit before James Hird was sacked. It’s a peptide party and only Essendon are invited but the coach didn’t know a thing about it… Hmm we think not!

As you can see there is an argument that can go with every example and if we wanted to we could take up a lot more of your time with what isn’t a sport but we’ve provided you with some of Abe’s best examples of what isn’t a sport. The man has an argument or come back for every example of a sport that he would have declassified from being a sport and the whole Idea started over a beer or two which funnily enough has now become part of a sport that has its own world championships. And yes ladies and gentlemen it’s a sport, Beer Pong the sport in which drunk men and women throw, you guessed it a ball into plastic red cups to make the other team get drunker and drunker. Run out of cups on the table and you lose. It’s a simple sport but nevertheless it is a sport.

Abe has been arguing for at least the last decade and no doubt has started a campaign or two for the rights of real sports. The problem though with Abe’s argument is that a lot of real sports are starting to die. With our interconnected world more and more children are staying inside and playing video games or chatting away to friends on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or any other online instant messaging system available. Heck even text messages are instantaneous these days unless you are on network Vodafone oh noooo. But in all seriousness, where did the kids go that had great imaginations and would play outside for hours on end until they were called inside for dinner. Oh that’s right the world changed and creeps roam the streets praying on women and small children like the monsters of myths, legends and fairytales.

So no matter where you fall on the great is it a sport debate, just remember the words of Abe the great. If it doesn’t have a ball it’s not a sport, if you can drive it, ride it or kill with it, it’s not a sport. The great sport debate will rage on throughout drinking holes around the globe for years to come. The Future of sports is unknown but we’ll no doubt see more and more technology involved in our favourite sports. From drones for viewing to GPS and heat mapping of players movements around the sporting field to no doubt robots taking the place of humans at some point in time throughout the future. It’s a scary new world for sports, those with balls anyways.

Yet another chapter to be filed away in the A Mind of Its Own chronicles. As the sun dips beyond the horizon on another day we’ll close this blog by saying the following. If you are a professional athlete and have taken offense to this because you don’t have a ball in your sport, take it up with Abe you can find him at the Raiders club in Canberra. The gungahlin one just FYI, for those looking to spark up the great debate over a beer or two and a slap on the pokies. I hear he’s a big fan of Where’s the Gold these days! On that note and the no doubt several calls we may get from Abe we’ll say goodbye and wish you all a pleasant week wherever you may be in this wonderful world.

Oh and if something doesn’t make sense there is a good chance Google can answer it for you, it’s helped us to research a lot of the things we write about here.

Things We Lost In the Fire…

After last weeks foray into self-help books and people not being able to be themselves or needing to wear a mask to the world. We thought we’d dive a little deeper into the study of evolutionary anthropology and look at one of only a handful of men who have a number named after him. Once we’ve done all that we’ll attempt to make light of why we struggle when presented with so much choice and why our choices often lead to what is more commonly known as the ‘fear of missing out’ or as the kids tend to say these days FOMO. So as we kick of another week of A Mind of Its Own we welcome old friends and new friends alike to yet another addition of Australia’s favourite blog. The country just doesn’t know it yet…

Being a topic that has piqued our interest us for quite some time now we thought it was only prudent that we lend our hand to spreading the message that is the study of evolutionary anthropology and psychology. It’s only fitting that we start with the man that introduced us to some of the studies that captured our imagination. It was Mark Manson who pointed out Professor Robin Dunbar and his now famous number in a talk he gave about his most recent self help book ‘Everything is F#cked’ at the Brisbane Powerhouse. The team attended as part of our exploration into the self help world and it’s so called gurus. (See previous blog for more context around the topic). So who is Robin Dunbar?, What is the Dunbar number and how did he come up with it? All will be revealed below along with some of our own observations, calculations and salutations.

Robin Ian McDonald Dunbar, born 28th of June 1947, for those that are into Astrology he’s a cancer, yep a crab. The man hails from our motherland, yes England and we wonder whether he’s ever thrown out the convict title when referring to all of us in the land down under. An anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist by trade he specialises in primate behaviour. However when asked what his research is all about Professor Dunbar usually responds with the following. He’s written multiple books on psychology, evolution, anthropology as well as scientific and research journals. Been interviewed on several occasions regarding the Dunbar number as well as had several people try to disprove his theory only to come back to the magic number around 150.

“My research is concerned with trying to understand the behavioural, cognitive and neuroendocrinological mechanisms that underpin social bonding in primates (in general) and humans (in particular). Understanding these mechanisms, and the functions that relationships serve, will give us insights on how humans have managed to create large scale societies using a form of psychological that is evolutionarily adapted to very small scale societies, and why these mechanisms are less than perfect in the modern world. This has implications for the design of social networking sites as well as mobile technology. We use conventional behavioural and cognitive experimental approaches, combined with network analysis, agent based modelling, comparative studies of primate brain evolution, neuroimaging and neuroendocrinology to explore explicit and implicit processes at both the dyadic and the group level. An important feature of our behavioural studies has been the constraints that time places on an individual’s ability to manage their relationships, and the cognitive tricks used to overcome these”.

So how did he come up with the Dunbar number and what is it? There is a complex answer and a simple answer to what is the Dunbar number and if you read on we’ll explain how Professor Dunbar came up with it. But First things first. The Dunbar number, what is it? It is the number of people you can have a relationship with involving trust and obligation. There is some personal history and not just names and faces. That’s the simple answer, the more complex answer goes a little something like this. The way our social world is constructed is part and parcel of our biological inheritance. Together with apes and monkeys, we form part of the primate family. Within that family there is a general relationship between the size of the brain and the size of the social group. We fit within a pattern. There are social circles beyond it and layers within it but there is a natural grouping that averages around 150. The Dunbar number is actually a series of them. The best known, a hundred and fifty, is the number of people we call casual friends—the people, say, you’d invite to a large party. (In reality, it’s a range: a hundred at the low end and two hundred for the more social of us.)

From there, through qualitative interviews coupled with analysis of experimental and survey data, Dunbar discovered that the number grows and decreases according to a precise formula, roughly a “rule of three.” The next step down, fifty, is the number of people we call close friends—perhaps the people you’d invite to a group dinner. You see them often, but not so much that you consider them to be true intimates. Then there’s the circle of fifteen: the friends that you can turn to for sympathy when you need it, the ones you can confide in about most things. The most intimate Dunbar number, five, is your close support group. These are your best friends (and often family members). On the flipside, groups can extend to five hundred, the acquaintance level, and to fifteen hundred, the absolute limit—the people for whom you can put a name to a face. While the group sizes are relatively stable, their composition can be fluid. Your five today may not be your five next week; people drift among layers and sometimes fall out of them altogether.

Firstly, it’s a little confusing as there is no specific number actually assigned as the ‘Dunbar number’, as previously stated above however 150 is a common number which is associated and the answer as to why will become more apparent as we explain how Professor Dunbar came across his numbering during a study. As to how the study came about well thanks to our cousins in the animal kingdom. Yes primates, whilst working on why primates spend so much time grooming each other he wanted to test a hypothesis that says primates have big brains and the reason why is because they live in a complex social world. Grooming being social, he hypothesised that all these things should be able to be mapped together. He started plotting brain size, group size and grooming time against one another in which he came out with a nice set of relationships.

According to the good professor, he had a light bulb moment rather early one morning around 3am where he wondered what would happen if he plugged humans into the study. After doing so he got a number of 150 connections, on first glance it looked implausibly small given that most people now live in cities. It turns out the number was the typical size of hunter gatherer societies. It was also the average size of a village in the Domesday Book (A manuscript record of the “Great Survey” conducted in much of England and parts of Wales in 1086 by order of King William The Conqueror).

The number turns out to be much the same when you have better data available. An example of this is parish registers in the 18th century. County by county the average village size was once again 150, except for Kent which was 100. Professor Dunbar has no idea why it is smaller but hypothesized that perhaps there was a higher density of people with bigger brains in Kent throughout the 18th century. Unfortunately the records available can not prove or disprove this theory. A quick google search though did tell us that the population in England exploded throughout the 18th century which is contrary to the Dunbar number and the parish records that state the average size of the village was 100 people.

The professor further hypothesized that the number most likely dates back to the appearance of anatomically modern humans around 250,000 years ago and by going back in time and estimating brain size we can see community sizes on the decline. Through evolutionary strategy we evolved and adapted as a social species. Most animal species aren’t as intensely social as humans, apes and monkeys. They tend to pair up and mate for life unlike primates, who whilst they tend to mate monogamously it’s not always for life or the same partner. We guess the lesson behind that is there is something computationally demanding about maintaining close relationships over a very long period of time as we all know.

Ok so when we started out on this little exploration into the Dunbar Number we were under the assumption that it was a number based on connections you could have in your life, which is correct but we being the A Mind of Its Own team thought it was a little simpler than it has turned out to be. Like most topics we tackle it’s just raising more and more questions but slowly the pieces of the puzzle are coming together to create the picture. So before we wrap it up for another week, we’ll answer two more burning questions and for once try to tie it all together in a nice neat bow for you, rather than leaving it ambiguous and unfinished as we’ve so often done.

The first of the final two questions is can we grow the Dunbar Number? Again there is a simple answer and complicated answer. In modern times we are caught in a somewhat of a bind as community sizes were designed for hunter-gatherer type societies, when people weren’t living on top of one another. Days gone by your 150 would be scattered over a wide area but everyone shared the same 150. It made for a dense interconnected community that policed itself. You didn’t need lawyers and policemen. If you stepped out of line you more than likely had granny to answer to. For the last twenty-two years, Dunbar has been “unpacking and exploring” what that number actually means—and whether our ever-expanding social networks have done anything to change it.

The problem we face is the sheer density of people, it stretches our networks rather than keeping them compact. Most people will have friends scattered around the world who don’t know one another. This in turn means we no longer have interwoven networks, therefore leading to less well integrated societies. So the question now becomes how do we recreate that old sense of community. That’s a social engineers problem that needs to be worked around. The alternative is that we evolve bigger brains, they’d have to be much bigger and that would take a long time.

The second of our final two questions actually started out our interest in all this and we have written about technology and whether it has killed off social interaction on several occasions in the past. What role does the internet and social media play in the Dunbar Number? Like an onion there are multiple layers to this question. Can you have meaningful relationships online with the old number of 150? Well the answer is yes according to Professor Dunbar. Using the example of Twitter, we can find out what you had for breakfast from a mere tweet. Can we really get to know one another better though? Digital developments have helped us to keep in touch when in the past a relationship might have died through distance of various other circumstances, however due to our biology in the end we actually have to get together to make a relationship work.

As humans we still rely heavily on touch and as hard as the crazy science guys have tried we still have worked out how to do virtual touch, perhaps when we cracked that big nut it may lead to a true Dunbar Number? The last and final piece to our puzzle is where does choice come into all of this? Living in an interconnected world we have an abundance of choice at our fingertips. We have everything we could possibly need at the palm of our hands. Every aspect of our lives can be managed from a device and for every aspect there are multiple choices. If we look at social media and the amount of connections people have on average, most people would say they have more than the average Dunbar Number. Most of the A Mind of its Own team certainly have more than 150 followers or are following 150 people whether it be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or any of the other social media platforms.

Ask yourself this question though, out of all those people who you follow or are following, how many of those people do you truly trust and feel an obligation towards to maintain your friendship. We can guarantee you that number won’t match the number you follow or thought. You may be able to arrange them into the various patterns of Dunbar Numbers but there will be some that float in between groups. So here’s our take on the whole Dunbar Number, the internet why the world is so ridiculously F#cked at present. Whilst many people will blame social media it was the internet that ruined the world. We (Humanbeings) thought that by providing each other with as much information as possible at our fingertips the truth would float to the top. That’s not the case our brains aren’t developed or evolved enough, if you will to compute that amount of data and work out whats fact from fiction.

The internet has provided us with freedom of choice when it comes to deciding what’s truth and what is a lie. The fact our thinking brain and feeling brain can’t make an educated decision due to the amount of data available has led us down the garden path in more ways than one. Unsubstantiated facts have have become the truth for many around the world as their feeling brains take over and that fact whilst not having any truth or in most cases science behind it, it now becomes their truth and the knock on effect is that each time they relay that fact if becomes more and more the truth they believe. Give someone too many choices whether it be selecting one festival to attend out of all them across a year, you are guaranteed that person will have some from of regret or FOMO.

In societal aspects this can be related to dating and the rise of online dating platforms like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Plenty of Fish and eHarmony. The fact that divorce is on the rise, polygamy and polyamory are now both acceptable in society leads one to believe we now have too much choice when it comes to finding a mate. In a society of swiping left and right, we no longer base our connections on more than just looks and are we truly getting to know people? An example of this are the boys and girls who are seeing multiple people at once as they can’t decide on just one person through fear of missing out that someone better might come along. Again we have too much choice and aren’t making the strong connections we would have made back in the day before we lived in an interconnected world. In relation to Dunbars numbers a lot of these people would start in the acquaintance group and depending on whether a relationship developed or not they could move up or out of the larger number.

On an even deeper level, there may be a physiological aspect of friendship that virtual connections can never replace.

So as we gift wrap this latest blog for you we can sum it up by saying, the internet killed the world and gave rise to anti-vaxxers, flat earthers and a lot of the internet’s other whack jobs. It’s responsible for providing a platform or soapbox to every man and its dog to play their violin and whinge their woe is me story. Or spew their hateful rhetoric across the internet. Whilst we are more interconnected than ever, we are not as interwoven as we have been throughout history and therefore our Dunbar Numbers stay relatively the same. Social media and internet dating sites and applications have given us too much choice and therefore we are not happy with the choices we are making. People no longer try to work things out due to this and sexually transmitted infections, apparently people didn’t like catching a disease are on the rise in 1st world countries. So all in all as Mark Manson put it, “Everything is Fucked” until next week do some thinking and work out who your 5 are. We know ours.

“Words are slippery, a touch is worth a 1,000 words any day”.

Love The Way You Lie…

We all have a past that’s the thing we need to understand, we need to work through and sometimes more than not we need to move past. That’s the thing about the past though it’s in the past, it has already happened and unless you’ve found a way to bend time and travel through it into the past there is not a goddamn thing we can do about it. What we can do though, is live in the gift that is now and make it so great that we have a grasp on what will become of the future, what we can do is make the most of the now as it will greatly impact what the future holds for us. As many a great philosopher and scholar has written we are able to mould the future to an image that most suits us, most suits our purpose.

With all the self help books and gurus in the world you would think by now that someone would have written a survival guide for getting through the day to day. We all experience things throughout our lives. Pain, death, loss, trauma, you name it and you will no doubt experience it at some point in your life. You’ll try to fix what you think is wrong with you or wrong with your life through various different means. You might try to fix it through reading the latest self help book about boosting your confidence or being a better person. Or opening up to pain, opening up to new ideas, new ways of thinking, a new you as all the guru’s books and bloggers will tell you and make you believe. Funny how a little bit of marketing can make you pick up a book, read a magazine and more importantly make you want to improve yourself.

Here at A Mind of Its Own we are all for the betterment of oneself and we encourage learning but does that need to come at the cost of who we truly are? Do we need to change who we are? Do we need to become someone different, someone we really aren’t or is it more a case that we don’t like who we truly are as a person and therefore are always searching to become a better person, a different person, a person that is as far away from our true self. A mask if you will to the public, a front that is put on to hide the real you, the one that stares back at you in the mirror that you lie about because the truth might just hurt you a little too much to accept. Where are the self help books that talk about that, that talk about how it’s ok being yourself and not needing to change.

Scouring the internet we searched and searched for a voice of truth, a voice that would say it’s ok but what we found were that people even the writers of these self help books don’t want to be themselves they found an excuse to believe in their own spin, their own hyperbole. Don’t get us wrong we’ve read our fair share around the office and the closest we’ve got to actually accepting some of the self help is Mark Manson. His style of writing and spin on the self help industry is somewhat refreshing in the fact he basically tells you not to give a fuck subtely. In his most recent book he tells us everything is fucked so in terms of telling it like it is he the closest we’ve come to someone telling us that its ok to be who you are and that things won’t change but here’s some tips and techniques on how to get around it all.

With social media and blog post everyone has become an expert on giving out advice about what and how people should live their lives. Every second person will give you their opinion on what you should do if your life falls into a heap, which books to read, which podcasts to listen to youtube videos that helped them get through a tough time in their lives. They tell you what you should eat, how much exercise you should do, how you should look after your mental health and the lack of educational degrees they have. Oh wait they won’t tell us about that as that would result in less followers and we couldn’t have that. Add to this we have the ramblers.

The social media ramblers who lives are posted across the internet and feel the need to document their entire life as well as telling you what you should be doing to be your best self and get yourself into that frame of mind to become that person you really want to be. These are the people that tend to flip and flop from one cause to another. They go through life bouncing from one place to another with little understanding of who they are and what they truly want. But they have a place in the self help guru guidance arena. Again, opinions are like arseholes everyone has one and the internet has allowed everyone to voice theirs.

So when someone writes the perfect self help book which is to tell everyone that it is more than ok to be yourself and that you are going to have good days and bad days, it’s called life. And life ladies and gentleman is always going to test you to make sure you know you are alive and that you will not be able to float through it, you will have to fight and sometimes you’ll have to get bloody both physically and mentally. You’ll want to give in from time to time but you’ll push through and you’ll actually learn a few truths about yourself that you hadn’t expected to learn or even knew about yourself. Had life not happened and you were forced to take a path and not know what could have happened would have learnt these lessons and things about yourself? Chances are highly unlikely.

After writing most of this blog we sent the team on a mission of exploration to watch the self help guru himself Mark Manson give a talk around his books and the inspiration and research that goes into writing a book for others. If this was a newspaper we may of had to write a retraction and eat our words. After reading his books and diving further into the research behind them it’s quite quickly apparent that the man has a good handle on the fact that life is F*#ked. It’s what you make of it right? We’ll yes and no, a lot of it has to do with psychology and the way we react to things that happen. A lot of it has to do with how we were raised, some of it is even genetic but what it all boils down to is the fact that as human beings we aren’t necessarily mentally equipped for the 21st century and all it has to offer.

We’ll talk about it a little more in next week’s blog but a lot of it has to freedom of choice and living standards alongside the fact that we now live in an interconnected world. All of this creates a social anxiety in which we aren’t often prepared for or know how to deal with on a day to day basis. We only see people on their perfect holidays, with their model girlfriends, having babies, buying a house or car and living out the lives in front of everyone else.

So we asked some hard questions of the team in an attempt to understand why we lie to ourselves and those around us, particularly when we’ve gone through something life changing. Something painful, soul crushing, soul destroying that changes us to be something we aren’t, someone we aren’t and wear a mask to the world. A lot of us choose to run, to hide and further mask our pain and discomfort with the world but for what benefit? A few minutes, hours or days of relief from the pain? Whatever it may be we all choose the path in which we walk and how we choose to react to a situation or event in our lives. Who’s to say it’s right or wrong other than you, we all decide what’s right for us in that moment but if we are going away from who we truly are at some point we’ll call ourselves out on it.

Or we’ll fall too far to save ourselves and become confused with what is reality and what is a lie. We’ll no longer wear the mask but the mask will wear us. We will have become that person we were trying so desperately to be instead of the person that we are because we are either scared of ourselves or so insecure in our own skin that we feel we need to be someone else altogether. By now we are just rambling but the point is this, throughout our lives we will all do it at some point, whether to impress people or make ourselves feel better. The key is to not get lost or entrenched so deep in the lie that it starts to become your reality and something that is far from the truth.

Just so you are aware this is not a self-help blog or the beginnings of a best seller this is and always will be A Mind of Its Own, a blog that will tell you all about the things people don’t want to tell you. We’ll write about the hard stuff, the political stuff, the down right dirty stuff and yeah from time to time we’ll provide you with some advice. Whether you choose to take it on board is up to you. The things we write and the opinions expressed throughout these posts are ours and ours alone. We will always try to be fair and give a voice to both sides of the story in order to let you make your own mind up. That’s part of the reasoning why we started A Mind of Its Own, we wanted to give a voice to the people who don’t have one and the topics that people would prefer are swept under the rug and not discussed.

We are a little public service announcement that no one really wants but everyone really needs. Our readers come from all walks of life and all have their own stories to tell. So when it comes to self-help and wanting to better your life. Leave it to the psychologists and people who have been to university to take advice from when it comes to bettering yourself. As for diet and exercise advice we also recommend you take it from someone trained not the local instagram lady who looks good in active wear who stole her program from her trainer and is now selling it for likes on the world wide web. We might often be a cynical bunch over here but we say a lot in jest we just feel strongly that things should be left to the professionals when it comes to matters of mental health and health in general.

So we’ll leave you for yet another week and remind you that next week’s blog will flow on from this weeks as we dive a little deeper into the psychology behind freedom of choice and how modern life gives us way too much choice that we just can’t cope with due to our brains not being able to process all the information we provide it. But that’s a story for next week’s a mind of it’s own. For now we’ll leave you with some lyrics from Passenger and wish you all a great weekend. Look after yourselves and take it easy hombres. From all of us here we wish you all the best in your weekend endeavours and make sure that if you decide to misbehave make sure you do it well. Ok peace out…

“When I was a kid the things I did were hidden under the grid, Young and naive I never believed that love could be so well hid, With regret I’m willing to bet and say the older you get, It gets harder to forgive and harder to forget, It gets under your shirt like a dagger at work,The first cut is the deepest but the rest still flipping hurt,You build your heart of plastic,Get cynical and sarcastic And end up in the corner on your own. Cause I’d love to feel love but I can’t stand the rejection, I hide behind my jokes as a form of protection, I thought I was close but under further inspection, It seems I’ve been running in the wrong direction”. – Passenger – The Wrong Direction.