The Cosmic Mind? By Brian Simpson
On Amazon.com, you will find plenty of pop science books, which have cashed in on the desire of book buyers to be bamboozled by the mysteries of quantum mechanics, even extending the ideas to health and healing. I have a healthy scepticism about ball, I mean all, of this stuff. Anyway, there is speculation that the universe is like a human brain. God help us all!
“An astrophysicist at the University of Bologna and a neurosurgeon at the University of Verona have claimed that the brain resembles the universe. The two Italian researchers came up with the galaxy-brain theory that is out of this world: The structures of the perceptible universe, they say, are astonishingly comparable to the neuronal networks of the human brain.
University of Bologna astrophysicist Franco Vazza and University of Verona neurosurgeon Alberto Feletti document the extraordinary similarities between the cosmic network of galaxies and the complex web of neurons in the human brain. The detailed study was published in the journal Frontiers in Physics showcasing the human brain has roughly 27 orders of magnitude separated in scale, while similarly, the composition of the cosmic web shows comparable levels of complexity and self-organization, according to the researchers.
The brain itself contains an estimated 69 billion neurons, while the visible universe is comprised of at least 100 billion galaxies, strung together like a mesh network. Even more intriguing both galaxies and neurons only account for about 30 percent of the total masses of the universe and brain. Further, both galaxies and neurons arrange themselves like pearls on a long string.
Beginning from the shared features of the two systems, the two researchers examined a simulation of the network of galaxies in comparison to sections of the cerebral cortex and the cerebellum. Their purpose was to inspect how matter variations propagate.
In the case of galaxies, the remaining 70 percent of mass is dark energy. The equivalent in the human brain, the pair said was water.”
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphy.2020.525731/full
None of that I find convincing, being at the level of metaphor rather than hard science. It is pretty difficult to see how this hypothesis could be tested, since humans are like neurons within the system, and cannot get out of the universe to see and test. But, who cares, on to the next gee whiz thing. How about the hypothesis that the universe is really a giant duck, swimming in a larger multiverse pond of dark chocolate energy? Sure, why not, anything goes.
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