Mosaic illustration by Jennifer Daniel for the New York Times

Are 5,001 Facebook Friends One Too Many?

By Aimee Lee Ball for The New York Times

THE British anthropologist and Oxford professor Robin Dunbar has posed a theory that the number of individuals with whom a stable interpersonal relationship can be maintained (read: friends) is limited by the size of the human brain, specifically the neocortex. “Dunbar’s number,” as this hypothesis has become known, is 150.