We are able to maintain relationships with hundreds of people, but remember - thousands: experiments on volunteers made it possible to calculate that our memory stores an average of five thousand human faces.
The average size of traditional settlements ranges from 150 to over 200 people. The same figures are indicated by the estimates of the population of the Neolithic sites, and the average number of "friends" in today's social networks. This value, first brought to the attention of the English anthropologist Robin Dunbar, is considered to be the usual limit on the number of permanent social bonds we can maintain. However, our ability to remember and distinguish faces is much broader and allows us to include in this circle thousands of other people who do not belong to our usual circle. In an article published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the average figure is five thousand.
British psychologist Rob Jenkins and his colleagues from the University of York recruited 25 volunteers who, for an hour, recalled as many acquaintances as possible, whose faces they remember, and then - for another hour - unfamiliar: politicians, musicians and other celebrities. There was no need to name names: it was enough to remember the appearance and indicate exactly who it was - say, “an actress, a friend of the heroine from such and such a film” or “studied in a parallel class”.
As you might expect, in the first minutes, the volunteers quickly filled out their lists, but the speed dropped noticeably within an hour. Of course, they could not recall absolutely all familiar faces in one session, however, continuing the graph, on the horizontal axis of which the time of recall is indicated, and on the vertical axis - the number of faces, the scientists extrapolated it and got the average figure. In addition, the volunteers were additionally shown pictures of nearly 3,500 celebrities whom they might have known, but not named immediately. Combining all of these results, the authors showed that the volunteers remembered between 1,000 and 10,000 individuals, with an average of around 5,000.
Sergey Vasiliev