Dear Amigo,
Let’s talk about the brain.
In his “Maps of Meaning” lecture series, Jordan Peterson mentions that the human brain has more connections than there are subatomic particles in the universe, making the brain the “most complex thing in the universe.”
I did some research on this concept, and it turns out a lot of people have claimed something similar. It isn’t true, however, at least not in the way that is immediately obvious.
If you count all the neurons in the brain and all the connections each neuron has, you can do some simple math and find that the brain has about 100 trillion neural connections.
That’s a big number, but it’s not even close to the number of atoms estimated to be in the entire universe. (That’s a number that’s something like 10^80, which is a much bigger number than 100 trillion!)
So, how could we understand Dr. Peterson’s above quote? We’ll talk about that tomorrow.
Until then,
Always remember to stay crispy, my friend.
Jacob Tullos
Jacob Tullos 