What women ask for in prospective mates is cues of wealth and status

when we looked at the patterns of contact before and after a change in friendships, they were almost identical. It seems that when we replace someone in our social network with a new friend, we slot the new friend into exactly the same position as that previously occupied by the old friend in terms of the frequency we contact them.

thread – all these depend crucially on being able to read the other person’s mind correctly, to anticipate what might interest them, to know what would follow logically on from what the speaker has just said

In fact, each layer of your social network is equivalent to a particular number of ‘pillars’ shared – six or seven for the innermost 5-layer, just one or two for the outer 150-layer.

the ratings increased with the number of mindstates (jokes that involve several protagonists are funnier than those that involve only one) up to five mindstates, but after that they quickly became less and less funny. It seems that when there are more than five minds involved people just cannot get their head around (yet another metaphor) the point

with most of the rest being breakdowns with someone you have known for most of your life – mainly, of course, close family.

Paying attention to something else inevitably creates a distraction that makes it harder to concentrate on the task we are supposed to be doing.

For brains, the equivalent of the software is the cognitive processes that allow the brain to think through what is going on in a social situation and to make predictions about how people will react if you behave in different ways. We actually have to learn much of that.

Very young children tend to play in parallel rather than interact with each other,