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Eat Sleep Work Repeat

Robin Dunbar makes the case for human connection

Eat Sleep Work Repeat

Bruce Daisley

Management, Workplace Culture, Science, Work, Business, Culture, Social Sciences

4.7 • 989 Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2021

⏱️ 57 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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What a guest today. I've tried to speak to Professor Robin Dunbar for 4 or 5 years.


Robin has a new book out called Friends which is the sort of book you can lose yourself in on a holiday (if anyone lets you have one).


I enjoyed it for surprising me and going beyond what I already knew.


So reliant are human beings on our social collaboration that it has been suggested that our bodies have evolved the feeling of loneliness, an alarm system that aggressively resists isolation. Many other animals don’t have anything close to this — some mammals and birds actively seek isolation, spending weeks and months alone aside from rituals of mating and raising their offspring - something that Robin Dunbar and others have demonstrated is a reflection of brain size.


Robin Dunbar ‘spent the better part of twenty-five years studying the behaviour of wild animals’ - mainly monkeys, goats and antelopes. He wanted to understand social evolution - why species had the social systems that they have developed. He admits that ‘humans were, at best, only a very superficial interest’. 


He noticed that monkeys and apes were social in a way that other animals were not. They would spend hours grooming each other, hours upon hours entwined round each other cleaning each other’s fur. ‘I had been deeply impressed by the fact that they groomed far more than they ever needed to for purely hygienic purposes’. It seemed there was some mutual pleasure in this action. When he took the time to explore what was the causal factor for this grooming long haired monkeys spent no longer grooming than shorthaired monkeys, large monkeys spent no longer grooming than small monkeys. The complexity of the hair management task wasn’t the prompt.


Rather it was the size of the brains of the primate that determined the amount of time spent. Dunbar proposed the Social Brain Hypothesis - that a species brain size constrains the size of its social group. ‘The problem with living in stable, permanent groups is that considerable diplomatic and social skills are needed to prevent the stresses and niggles of living in close proximity with others from overwhelming us,’ - we need big brains to help us manage the politics of a bigger tribe.

 

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Transcript

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0:00.0

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It's payments, point of sale and reporting all in one.

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It also connects your front and back of house, which you nail every order and Square's reporting feature can help you save hours on accounting every week.

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Join at Square.com. Square, big in restaurants.

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Square Up Europe Limited is authorized by the Financial Conduct Authority under the Electronic

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Money Regulations 2011.

0:27.7

Registered reference number 900846. This is Eat Sleep Work Repeat. It's a podcast about making work better.

0:41.2

Hello, hello, hello, hello.

0:43.1

Thank you for joining.

0:44.2

I'm Bruce Dazley.

0:45.4

First thing I will say is that if you are here

0:47.6

because you're interested in improving your workplace

0:50.1

culture in terms of making work better, then one of the best things that you could do

0:55.4

is you could sign up for the newsletter and you'll get that at eat sleep work repeat.

1:00.3

com. There's also a link to it in the show notes below and I had a lot of people had several

1:06.4

hundred new sign-ups this week and a lot of people said wow I never knew this

1:11.3

existed this is exactly the sort of thing that we're debating at work at the moment.

1:16.2

So this week's newsletter was the 10 stages of making the decisions

1:21.7

of what the return to the office looks like for your firm.

1:25.2

I think you'll find that useful and stimulating and I think there's a lot of considerations

1:31.0

along the way that people have said thank you for calling out this part or this part.

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