I can name all three of Prince William and Kate’s children, in birth order. I also know more about Tom Brady than I ever intended to.
I discovered this about myself last Tuesday while standing at the kitchen counter, waiting for the coffee, thinking of nothing in particular. I have visited England more than once, and the royal family has never once invited me to tea. Tom Brady has never called either. I could not, if you asked me right now, tell you the names of all of my cousin’s children, and I have known her my whole life.
This bothered me just long enough to look up why.
There is a name for this phenomenon. It’s called a parasocial relationship. Sociologists coined the term decades ago after noticing how attached people became to media personalities they had never met, and it turns out the description still fits most of us.
Here’s the trouble with being a person: our instincts are old. Our brains evolved for one world but now must navigate another. For most of human history, the people you saw regularly were members of your own community, and your survival depended on remembering whether that person had ever stolen your goat.
The brain built a very efficient rule: a familiar face is someone worth tracking.
Nobody warned the brain that one day it would see thousands of familiar faces every week. Most would never meet you. Many would be paid to appear in a small glass rectangle and look you straight in the eye.
This is, if you think about it for more than a minute, a rather touching design flaw. We are creatures built for connection, so ready to form social bonds that we’ll invent them from a familiar face or voice rather than go without. Watch someone long enough and your brain begins filling in the rest of the relationship on its own.
I bring this up not to excuse myself but to spread the blame appropriately across the centuries. Readers were buying pamphlets about famous actors and their scandals in the 1700s, long before anyone had a screen to stare at.
By 1911, movie studios had figured out how to package the whole business, and magazines like “Photoplay” were selling readers a curated, breathless intimacy with people they would never meet.
By the 1940s, “Life and Look” had turned that intimacy into a weekly ritual. Glossy photo spreads let ordinary readers study a star’s face the way they might study a family member’s, and people lined up at the newsstand for every issue.
We like to think modern fame and modern gossip are new diseases. They are old ones with better delivery systems. Social media simply put them on a 24-hour schedule and gave everyone a front-row seat.
I have made a kind of peace with the fact that I am a village-sized creature trying to navigate a globally connected society with a brain that evolved to keep track of a much smaller circle of people.
Some of us give that attention to a princess. Some of us give it to Tom Brady. Some of us give it to the faces that appear on our phones every day.
The instinct isn’t the problem. The object of our attention deserves a little more scrutiny. Our brains evolved to recognize familiar faces. They were never meant to encounter so many of them.
Margaret Bacon is the founder and senior editor of VeryCoolFacts.com, home of a free weekly newsletter, and Safe Harbor Media Group, an educational media platform built around verified, insight-driven storytelling. Her work explores history, science, culture and the enduring patterns of human behavior that shape how we think and act today. She has lived in Marblehead for 40 years.
