This story is a part of our Cosmic Perspective sequence, by which we confront the staggering vastness of the cosmos and our place in it. Learn the remainder of the sequence right here.

An astrophysicist and a surgeon stroll right into a bar. No, this isn’t the beginning of a nasty joke. A couple of years in the past, astrophysicist Franco Vazza met his childhood buddy Alberto Feletti, who had turn out to be a neurosurgeon. As they reminisced and chatted about their work – Vazza modelling the construction of the universe, Feletti poring over the composition of the mind – a thought struck them: why not examine the 2?

Vazza, based mostly on the College of Bologna, Italy, did simply that. He used statistical strategies to match the neurons in a single space of the mind, the cortex, with the cosmic internet, the sample of matter distribution throughout the universe. Vazza seemed on the variety of nodes in every community and the way densely every node was related. The results surprised him. “It’s a tantalising degree of similarity,” he says. The constructions differ in measurement by some 27 orders of magnitude. However in the event you ignore that, “the 2 patterns kind of overlap”, says Vazza.

For some physicists, this likeness is just too tempting to disregard. Some have even steered the chance that the universe “thinks” or is in some sense aware, an thought with roots within the philosophy of panpsychism.

Historically, researchers defined consciousness in one in every of two methods. Materialists say matter is all there may be and consciousness – in some way – emerges from it. Dualists say there are…