“Some part of our being knows this is where we came from,” says Carl Sagan at one point during his epic cosmology-narrating documentary, Cosmos. “We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” I remember reading that second-t0-last sentence somewhere as a kid before I’d even seen the show in the 1980s. “Star-stuff,” an economic, deeply poetic way of driving such an elegant point home. It was mind-blowing to me at the time, back in grade school, just beginning to wrap my head around how scientists thought the puzzle pieces fit together. But what if it turned out that what we’ve become over the course of evolutionary eons is about more than just the elemental stuff that stars and planets and nebulae are made of? What if the very structure of our brains, as well as the things our brains can lay claim to — constructs like the Internet, social networks, etc. — resembled the underlying structure of the universe itself? That’s what a recent study published in the science journal Nature’s Scientific Reports suggests — that not only are we star-stuff, but that there may be a kind of cosmic feedback loop in the design of our brains and what we’ve created using them. “By no means do we claim that the universe is a global brain or a computer,” said Dmitri Krioukov (via UCSD News), one of the paper’s co-authors and a senior research scientist at the University of California, San Diego. (He’s also the guy who, back in April, successfully appealed a failure-to-stop traffic ticket by writing a four-page research paper that suggested, using basic high-school math, why he wasn’t guilty as charged.) But while the paper isn’t an attempt to describe the universe as some sort of vast, cosmic intellect, Krioukov says brain-universe parallels exist: “[The] discovered equivalence between the growth of the universe and complex networks strongly suggests that unexpectedly similar laws govern the dynamics of … Continue reading Your Brain, the Internet and the Universe Have Something Fascinating in Common