We see our feed flooded by success stories, Open to Work badges, job-change banners, birthdays, and a congratulations template for completing x years at ABC company.
They might catch our attention, but not our clicks. These are good for discoverability, but overwhelming to make us focus and act.
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In the midst of these, we tend to act to maintain relationships with those who can actually make a shift in our personal and professional lives.
Maybe you can’t recall which college friend just had twins, or the mentor who asked for your address, or a friend who told you about this client for your startup.
This even brings us down to zero, where we lost opportunities that they might have shared with us if we were in their memory.
It’s not early dementia; it’s a feature of modern platforms: the more names they show you, the faster you forget the people who matter.
(Why your thumb is erasing people faster than you can meet them)
You open LinkedIn “just to check notifications.”Seven minutes, 41 thumbnails, and 600 words of congratulatory fluff later, you’ve already forgotten the first post.
What’s happening inside your head
Working-memory overload – Each flick injects new faces before your brain can file the last ones. The hippocampus throws its hands up and dumps context.
Attention residue – Micro-switching from birthday post → funding round → meme leaves mental “breadcrumbs” that crowd out real memories.
Reward hijack – Dopamine pings from likes make novelty feel urgent; depth feels optional. Platforms cash in, your recall cashes out.
Quick self-test
Without looking, list the last three people who posted job promotions.
Now write one specific detail about each (team, city, project).
Struggling? That’s scroll-induced dementia in action.
Good news: the cure isn’t quitting LinkedIn; it’s building a quiet circle around the handful who truly matte, so each swipe becomes intentional, not amnesic.
Taking you a few years back in the early 1990s, a British evolutionary psychologist, biological anthropologist, noticed a tight mathematical link between the size of a primate’s neocortex (the brain’s social reasoning HQ) and the average size of its social group.
He plotted dozens of monkeys, apes species on one graph he extended the regression to the far right, where Homo sapiens sits, the y-axis landed at ~150.
Dunbar published his findings in the Journal of Human Evolution (1992) and later refined them through fieldwork and historical data:
Hunter-gatherer camps: typically 120–160 members.
Roman military units: ~150 soldiers per company.
Medieval English villages: parish rolls clustered near 150.
Later on MRI studies were done which linked larger personal networks to thicker regions of the prefrontal cortex, lending neurological weight to Dunbar’s hypothesis. While there has been flexibility in their findings, the range mostly lay in a 100-200 window. Moreover, the core idea remained the same: our brain’s circuitry caps the count of relationships we can juggle with full context and trust.
That’s why adding yet another stranger on LinkedIn feels effortless, but remembering their child’s name six months later feels impossible-it’s a hardware limit, not a character flaw.
So, Dunbar’s findings created the term Dunbar’s number = 150.
Beyond 150, the story behind each name fades, so follow-ups feel awkward.
LinkedIn is phenomenal for discovering people. Twitter is priceless for ideas.Bondub plugs in after discovery, discovery-the quiet layer where you:
Save context crumbs (birthdays, goals, last project).
Get gentle nudges to follow up while the moment’s warm.
Nurture your network based on your goals.
Track “Trust Density” so you see which ties actually tighten.
Actively follow the plans set up by our algorithm-free algorithm and our experts
Think of Bondub as your private, trust-verified space, where every “add” means genuine intent and shared growth. It’s the tool that brings out your generous side and makes you the go-to person your network can’t wait to help.
Trust-First Connections
Growth-Together Focus
Give-Receive Loop
Get its early access by clicking the button below or visit bondub.com
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