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Mind

Is the human brain really the most complex object in the universe?

There are 86 billion neurons in your brain, roughly the same number as there are galaxies in the observable universe. Whether the mind is more complex than the cosmos, however, is up for debate

By Thomas Lewton

21 February 2024

D84PBB NGC 6888, the Crescent Nebula. — The Crescent Nebula: more complex than the human brain?
Reinhold Wittich/Stocktrek Images/Alamy

BACK in 2012, neuroscientist Christof Koch wrote in his book Consciousness: Confessions of a romantic reductionist that the human brain is “the most complex object in the known universe”. 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 at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico – created in the 1980s as a hub for the budding field of complexity science – he…

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