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An astrophysicist and a neurosurgeon entered a room.
It may seem like the beginning of a bad joke, but what a couple of Italian researchers have come up with is a true galactic brain: the structures of the observable universe, they say, are strikingly similar to the neural networks of the human brain.
University of Bologna astrophysicist Franco Vazza and University of Verona neurosurgeon Alberto Feletti detail the striking similarities between the cosmic network of galaxies and the complex network of neurons in the human brain in a new article published in the journal Borders in physics. Despite being about 27 orders of magnitude apart in scale, the human brain and the composition of the cosmic network show similar levels of complexity and self-organization, according to the researchers.
The brain contains about 69 billion neurons, while the observable universe is made up of at least 100 billion galaxies, loosely bound together like a web. Both real galaxies and neurons account for only about 30 percent of the total masses of the universe and the brain, respectively. And both galaxies and neurons arrange themselves like pearls on long strings or filaments.
In the case of galaxies, the remaining 70 percent of mass is dark energy. The equivalent in the human brain, the duo said: water.
“We calculated the spectral density of both systems,” Vazza said in a statement at the work. “This is a technique often used in cosmology to study the spatial distribution of galaxies.”
“Our analysis showed that the distribution of fluctuation within the neuronal network of the cerebellum on a scale of 1 micrometer to 0.1 millimeter follows the same progression as the distribution of matter in the cosmic network,” he added, “but, of course. , on a larger scale ranging from 5 million to 500 million light years “.
The grouping and number of connections from each node were also eerily similar.
“Once again, structural parameters have identified unexpected levels of agreement,” Feletti said in the statement. “Probably, the connectivity within the two networks evolves following similar physical principles, despite the obvious and evident difference between the physical powers that regulate galaxies and neurons.”
The team hopes their preliminary study will lead to new analytical techniques in both cosmology and neurosurgery, allowing scientists to better understand how these structures have evolved over time.
READ MORE: Does the human brain look like the universe? [University of Bologna]
More on galaxies: Astronomers perplexed by the ancient Milky Way-like galaxy 12 billion light years away
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