That image looks almost exactly like a slice of your brain under a microscope. An astrophysicist and a neurosurgeon spent years figuring out why. The numbers line up way too well to be a coincidence.
Their 2020 paper took an unusual approach. They put pictures of brain tissue next to pictures of the universe and measured everything they could: the shape, the connections, how densely things clumped together. Almost every number came back the same.
In the image above, each bright dot is a galaxy, and each dim strand is a filament pulling galaxies toward one another. Each galaxy sits inside a network, connected to about 4 others on average. Zoom into brain tissue with a microscope, and each neuron connects to about 5 others. The clustering pattern matches, and the overall shape of the network does too. One system fits inside your head. The other stretches across tens of billions of light-years, a size gap of roughly a billion billion billion.
And the parallels go deeper than structure. Your brain is 77% water, sitting there and taking up space. The universe is 70% dark energy, also sitting there and taking up space. In both, only about a quarter of the total stuff is doing any real work. Your whole life's worth of memories would take about 2.5 million gigabytes to store. The full complexity of the observable universe, every galaxy position across 90 billion light-years, would take roughly 4.3 million gigabytes. Not far apart.
The picture in this tweet is the new DESI map, a project from a telescope in Arizona that just finished cataloging 47 million galaxies over five years. That is six times every previous galaxy survey put together. And when you look at it, you are looking at something built like a brain.
Either the universe runs on the same playbook your head does, or there are only a handful of ways any complex network can organize itself.
I’ve tasted going back to an ex, and I’ve tasted trying to fix a relationship before it breaks, I highly recommend focusing on your career and going to sleep before 10PM.
I honestly don’t care if I get fired, I was apart of the Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups gambling scandal.
My name is Nico Harrison and I work for the Dallas Mavericks.