Your Brain or the Universe?

These two images were published in the New York Times Science Times. One is a picture of neurons in a mouse’s brain, and the other is a computer-rendered image of what a section of the universe looks like. What is really astounding is the similarity between the two pictures. The short sentence accompanying the images states, “together the suggest the surprisingly similar patterns found in vastly different natural phenomenon.” But the neuron and the universe are not just different, their sizes are orders of magnitude apart from each other. And so the similarity between these images reveals a fractal-like relationship across a vast scale—providing a great visual for the idea of subjective consiousness: ‘the universe is within your mind.’ The phenomenon of how the same pattern can appear in wildly different places, is, to me, one of the great mysteries of the universe. Maybe someday we will understand it more deeply, but for now it is enough to know that there are plenty of things left to figure out (assuming we don’t cut the party short by destroying the planet first).