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<\/div>The Crescent Nebula: more complex than the\u00a0human brain?<\/p>\n
Reinhold Wittich\/Stocktrek Images\/Alamy<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n
BACK in 2012, neuroscientist Christof Koch wrote in his book Consciousness: Confessions of a romantic reductionist<\/i> that the human brain is \u201cthe most complex object in the known universe\u201d. Given that there are about 86 billion neurons in a brain, connected up in ways that we are only beginning to unravel, this seems intuitive. But when I put it to David Wolpert<\/a> at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico \u2013 created in the 1980s as a hub for the budding field of complexity science \u2013 he doesn\u2019t see it that way. \u201cIt\u2019s almost farcical to entertain that we are the most complex system in the universe,\u201d he says. \u201cThe question is actually wrongheaded.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite this, I persevere. Surely, there is some common measure of complexity that can be applied to all kinds of intricate systems? After all, if you squint, clusters of galaxies and the filaments that connect them look like tangled circuits of neurons. There are even roughly the same number of neurons in the human brain as there are galaxies in the observable universe. This similarity in form may have something to do with general laws through which complexity emerges, says Ricard Sol\u00e9<\/a> at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. Or it may not. \u201cCoincidentally, that might appear in both systems, but that doesn\u2019t mean anything,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Besides, complexity isn\u2019t defined by components and their interconnections. It is the idea that the whole is more than the\u2026<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n