Often times, we look up into the night sky and ponder the thought of exactly what is out there, what holds everything together and how is everything connected. As Human’s we long for connections that establish relationships between things. We like to group things so that we can identity similarities in order to understand. One such thing that Human’s have been trying to understand for sometime, is what exactly the universe is? Thanks to one study that question might have been already been answered.
A study was published in Nature’s Scientific Reports that attempted to link together similarities between how the universe grows and how our brain grows. The universe may be growing in the same was as a giant brain – with the electrical firing between brain cells ‘mirrored’ by the shape of expanding galaxies. The study produced a computer simulation that mirrored our current universe and the computer simulation suggests that “natural growth dynamics” (the way a system evolves) are the same for different kinds of networks – whether it is the internet, the human brain or the universe as a whole.
When the team compared the universe’s history with growth of social networks and brain circuits, they found all the networks expanded in similar ways: They balanced links between similar nodes with ones that already had many connections. For instance, a cat lover surfing the Internet may visit mega-sites such as Google or Yahoo, but will also browse cat fancier websites or YouTube kitten videos. In the same way, neighboring brain cells like to connect, but neurons also link to such “Google brain cells” that are hooked up to loads of other brain cells.
“The new study suggests a single fundamental law of nature may govern these networks”, said physicist Kevin Bassler of the University of Houston.
”For a physicist it’s an immediate signal that there is some missing understanding of how nature works,” -says Dmitri Krioukov from the University of California San Diego.
The connection between the brain and the universe in at least my point of view is a very reassuring one, a viewpoint that gives connection to what was before a puzzle. So this may seem weird, but let’s think about this. We always talk about consciousness being the underlying fabric of the universe from which all things emerge (M-theory, string theory, Unified Field Theory, etc). Consciousness is known to be the ground of being. So not only is the universe conscious like a brain, it is growing like a brain as well. But here’s a question…a brain to what? Is it possible we exist as a thought within the mind of some Super Intelligence? Are we just cells in the mind of the Universe? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s fascinating to think about.