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A fascinating oddity of the Universe is that shapes and patterns can be found in extremely different contexts: the Golden Spiral can be seen in the human cochlea and in the shape of a spiral galaxy; the fractal geometry of the veins echoed in the ramifications of lightning.
In a bold new pilot study, an astrophysicist and neurosurgeon have taken a quantum leap, using quantitative analysis to compare two of the most complex systems in nature: the neuronal network in the human brain and the cosmic network of galaxies in the Universe.
It’s actually not that strange a comparison. You may have seen an image that is shared from time to time, showing a human neuron and a simulated cluster of galaxies, side by side; the two look strikingly similar.
(Mark Miller / Virgo Consortium / Visual Complexity)
But there is much more to the human brain – and the Universe – than it looks like.
So astrophysicist Franco Vazza from the University of Bologna in Italy and neurosurgeon Alberto Feletti from the University of Verona in Italy have spent the last few years investigating to determine if the similarities are more than superficial.
Writing in Nautilus Quarterly in 2017 they explained:
“Galaxies can group into huge structures (called clusters, superclusters and filaments) that span hundreds of millions of light years. The boundary between these structures and nearby expanses of empty space called cosmic voids can be extremely complex.
Gravity accelerates matter to these boundaries at speeds of thousands of kilometers per second, creating shock waves and turbulence in intergalactic gases.
We predicted that the boundary of the empty filament is one of the most complex volumes in the universe, measured by the number of bits of information needed to describe it.
This got us thinking: is it more complex than the brain? “
The two types of structures differ in size by 27 orders of magnitude (or one billion billion billion). But the team’s findings suggest that while the physical processes that drive the structure of the Universe and the structure of the human brain are hugely different, they can lead to similar levels of complexity and self-organization, the researchers said.
The starting point was the elaboration of similarities between the two. The human cerebellum has about 69 billion neurons; the observable cosmic web contains over 100 billion galaxies. That is one.
Both systems are organized in well-defined networks, with nodes (neurons in the brain, galaxies in the Universe) connected by filaments.
Neurons and galaxies both have a typical scale radius that is only a fraction of the length of the filaments. And the flow of information and energy between the nodes is only about 25 percent of the mass and energy content of each system.
Furthermore, there are similarities between the composition of the brain and the composition of the Universe. The brain contains about 77% water. The universe contains about 72% of dark energy.
Both are apparently passive materials that permeate their respective systems and play only an indirect role in their internal structures.
With these similarities defined, the team subsequently embarked on a quantitative comparison of the two, based on the images. They obtained sections of the human cerebellum and cortex at different magnifications and compared them to simulations of the cosmic network.
What they were looking for were similarities in the fluctuations in the density of matter between the brain and the cosmic web. And they found that the relative distribution of fluctuations in the two systems was strikingly similar, albeit on very different scales.
A slice of cerebellum with 40x magnification (left) and simulated cosmic network 300 light-years to the side (right). (University of Bologna)
“We calculated the spectral densities of both systems. This is a technique often employed in cosmology to study the spatial distribution of galaxies,” Vazza said.
“Our analysis showed that the distribution of the fluctuation within the neuronal network of the cerebellum on a scale from 1 micrometer to 0.1 mm follows the same progression as the distribution of matter in the cosmic network but, obviously, on a larger scale. ranging from 5 million to 500 million light years “.
But that wasn’t all.
The team looked at other morphological characteristics, such as the number of strands attached to each node. The cosmic network, based on a sample of between 3,800 and 4,700 nodes, averaged 3.8-4.1 connections per node. Human cortex, for a sample between 1,800 and 2,000 nodes, had an average of 4.6-5.4 connections per node.
Furthermore, both systems have shown a tendency to group connections around central nodes. And they both appear to have similar information capacity.
A recent study suggests that human brain memory is around 2.5 petabytes. Another recent study, by Vazza, suggests that the memory capacity required to store the complexity of the Universe is about 4.3 petabytes.
“Put simply,” the researchers wrote in 2017, “this similarity in memory capacity means that the entire body of information that is stored in a human brain (for example, a person’s entire life experience) can also be encoded in the distribution of galaxies in our universe. “
This does not mean that the Universe is a brain or capable of being sentient. But it suggests that the laws governing the growth of both structures may be the same.
According to a 2012 paper based on simulations, the causal network that represents the large-scale structure of spacetime in our accelerating universe is a power law graph remarkably similar to the human brain.
Studies like this, by Vazza and Feletti, could pave the way for a better understanding of those laws.
“Once again, structural parameters have identified unexpected levels of agreement. 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,” he said. said Feletti.
“These two complex networks show more similarities than those shared between the cosmic network and a galaxy or a neuronal network and the interior of a neuronal body.”
The research was published in Borders in physics.
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