This story is a part of our Cosmic Perspective sequence, during 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 foul joke. A couple of years in the past, astrophysicist Franco Vazza met his childhood good friend Alberto Feletti, who had develop into 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, primarily based on the College of Bologna, Italy, did simply that. He used statistical strategies to check the neurons in a single space of the mind, the cortex, with the cosmic net, 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 linked. The results surprised him. “It’s a tantalising stage of similarity,” he says. The buildings differ in dimension by some 27 orders of magnitude. However when you ignore that, “the 2 patterns type of overlap”, says Vazza.

For some physicists, this likeness is just too tempting to disregard. Some have even prompt the likelihood that the universe “thinks” or is in some sense acutely 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…