Of the Study of Invisibility and Odd Titles

Do you know the name of your garbageman? Or how about the condition of your waiter's love life? In all truth, you probably don't; to you they're just some person who goes about their life without any strong reference to yours. And while some people claim society or technology is to blame for this ("Back in my day I knew everybody in town! You young'uns need to get your face out of your phone and talk to people!"), the truth is far more sinister. Enter the dubiously-titled "Monkeysphere." Also known more scientifically as Dunbar's number, this concept refers to the number of other people a person can maintain stable relationships with. And since it all started with some harmless monkey fun, why don't we start with a monkey illustration?

Say you have a pet monkey. His name is not important, but the basic idea is that you have a good knowledge of your monkey friend. You and he might play together, fight evil together, it's not too important. You'd miss him if he died. But now, you have five monkeys. A little bit tougher, but with some practice you can distinguish each monkey by their little monkey ways. How about one hundred? It gets tougher. But, the point is still the same, more monkeys equals more problems. Eventually, you get to a point where there's simply too many monkeys to handle, and they become a wave of hair and flesh. But instead of being some lofty philosophical ideal, we've discovered experimentally at what point double the monkey is not double the fun. It varies from researcher to researcher, but it is thought to lie between one hundred and two hundred thirty (one hundred fifty being the commonly used value).

"So, what does this matter? I don't have any monkeys," you say. The problem is, it doesn't just apply to our little friends. That number corresponds to how many humans the typical person can know well and continue to know well without having a breakdown. And it all ties back into the invisibility of Ellison's Invisible Man (and, to a degree, how Bigger thinks about white people in Native Son). The entire point of the narrator's invisibility in Invisible Man is that others don't truly know him, but assume something about him and go with it. In fact, that's what happens to those who fall outside your Monkeysphere. While you may know those within it like the back of your hand, if they fall outside, your brain just assumes something to fill in the void of information you have about them, and no harm is made (on you). Similarly, how different is Bigger's "white mountain" view of the white people around him too different from the earlier illustration of a wave of monkeys? To Bigger, there's so many of them, and they're all so foreign from him, that he just has to assume that they constitute one grand force against him. It takes someone to break the mold (Max) before he realizes what he's done. And so, in an odd sort of way, both writers wrote to an obscure neuroscientific principal that underlies the very principles of our society.