Understanding Brain Health via Cosmological Health, and vice versa

LEFT: SECTION OF CEREBELLUM (DR. E. ZUNARELLI, UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL OF MODENA); RIGHT: SECTION OF A COSMOLOGICAL SIMULATION (VAZZA ET AL. 2019 A&A). CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA

Neu­ro­science Meets Astro­physics: Does the Human Brain Resem­ble the Uni­verse? (SciTech­Dai­ly):

In their paper pub­lished in Fron­tiers of Physics, Fran­co Vaz­za (astro­physi­cist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bologna) and Alber­to Felet­ti (neu­ro­sur­geon at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Verona) inves­ti­gat­ed the sim­i­lar­i­ties between two of the most chal­leng­ing and com­plex sys­tems in nature: the cos­mic net­work of galax­ies and the net­work of neu­ronal cells in the human brain.

Despite the sub­stan­tial dif­fer­ence in scale between the two net­works (more than 27 orders of mag­ni­tude), their quan­ti­ta­tive analy­sis, which sits at the cross­roads of cos­mol­o­gy and neu­ro­surgery, sug­gests that diverse phys­i­cal process­es can build struc­tures char­ac­ter­ized by sim­i­lar lev­els of com­plex­i­ty and self-organization.

The human brain func­tions thanks to its wide neu­ronal net­work that is deemed to con­tain approx­i­mate­ly 69 bil­lion neu­rons. On the oth­er hand, the observ­able uni­verse can count upon a cos­mic web of at least 100 bil­lion galax­ies. With­in both sys­tems, only 30% of their mass­es are com­posed of galax­ies and neu­rons. With­in both sys­tems, galax­ies and neu­rons arrange them­selves in long fil­a­ments or nodes between the fil­a­ments. Final­ly, with­in both sys­tems, 70% of the dis­tri­b­u­tion of mass or ener­gy is com­posed of com­po­nents play­ing an appar­ent­ly pas­sive role: water in the brain and dark ener­gy in the observ­able Universe.

The Study:

The Quan­ti­ta­tive Com­par­i­son Between the Neu­ronal Net­work and the Cos­mic Web (Fron­tiers in Physics):

• From the Intro­duc­tion: “Cen­tral to our vision of Nature are two fas­ci­nat­ing sys­tems: the net­work of neu­rons in the human brain and the cos­mic web of galax­ies … Although the rel­e­vant phys­i­cal inter­ac­tions in the above two sys­tems are com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent, their obser­va­tion through micro­scop­ic and tele­scop­ic tech­niques have cap­tured a tan­ta­liz­ing sim­i­lar mor­phol­o­gy, to the point that it has often been not­ed that the cos­mic web and the web of neu­rons look alike.”
• From the Dis­cus­sion: “We have pre­sent­ed a detailed com­par­i­son between the neu­ronal net­work and the cos­mic web, two of the most fas­ci­nat­ing and com­plex net­works in Nature, with the goal of assess­ing the lev­el of sim­i­lar­i­ty between these two phys­i­cal sys­tems in an objec­tive way…Together with the rest of the analy­sis pre­sent­ed in this work, such sim­i­lar­i­ties are meant to moti­vate the devel­op­ment of more pow­er­ful and dis­crim­i­nat­ing algo­rithms to pin­point analo­gies and dif­fer­ences of these fas­ci­nat­ing sys­tems, almost at the con­ceiv­able extremes of spa­tial scales in the Universe.”

The Study in Context:

• Under­stand your con­nec­tome, under­stand yourself
• Awe­some: Brain scans shed light on the brain net­works sup­port­ing Awe