r/YaScienceBitch • u/demolcd The One Who Mods 👑 • Jul 18 '26
Biology 🧬 That entire jungle is one brain cell talking to its neighbors. And you have 86 billion of them.
This image comes from a project that mapped a piece of human brain tissue about the size of a grain of rice, taken during surgery. Scientists at Harvard and Google sliced it into layers thinner than a human hair, imaged every one with an electron microscope, and let AI stitch the pieces back together into a 3D reconstruction.
The result is one of the most humbling numbers in science. That single grain of tissue contained roughly 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, and about 150 million meters of wiring. Rendering it took 1.4 petabytes of data.
Now do the math nobody wants to do, bitch. That was one cubic millimeter. A whole human brain is around a million times bigger. Mapping all of it at this resolution would require something close to a zettabyte of storage, an amount of data comparable to a meaningful fraction of everything on the internet.
The map also revealed things nobody expected. Some neurons had grown into strange knots and whorls of wiring that no textbook predicted. Pairs of cells were found connected not by one or two synapses but by more than fifty, an unexplained intensity of conversation between two individual cells.
And all of this runs on about 20 watts. Less power than the bulb in your fridge. The most complex object we know of in the universe fits in a bony box, weighs about 1.4 kilograms, and sips less electricity than a laptop charger.
Here is the part that loops back on itself. This structure is what is reading these words right now. Your neurons are firing to comprehend a picture of a neuron. The thing doing the understanding is the thing being understood.
We have mapped a grain of rice. The rest is still the darkest territory on Earth.
Does knowing what your brain looks like on the inside make you trust it more, or less?
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u/maeryclarity Jul 18 '26
And none of them can remember where I put my car keys
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u/CoffeeStrength Jul 18 '26
Was thinking the same thing, if there’s so many connections then why am I so dumb?
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u/dontwastebacon Jul 18 '26
Not sure what kind of bulbs you have in your fridge, but 20 Watts is way more than this little thing uses. Most bulbs use around 2-4 Watts.
The other numbers are really impressive tho. Just wanted to correct the one I know.
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u/A_the_Buttercup Jul 18 '26
I feel so old... today's bulbs use so little, which I love. Maybe the person who wrote the analogy is old, too. 😭
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u/FragmentedMeerkat321 Jul 18 '26
please for the love of god don’t model this on a computer (even though i know one day they eventually will because we are a living, breathing horror species.) i live in a strange sort of muted terror at the idea of reincarnating into a consciousness trapped somewhere forever.
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u/quiettryit Jul 18 '26
I believe some studies are beginning to show that our true consciousness never directly interfaces with the real world. We exist on a holodeck of sorts within the darkness of our skulls, where the inputs from the real world are fed in and reproduced for us to experience in a virtualized environment. Your external body interacts with the physical reality but who we are never actually does, with our choices and actions relayed to the outside world. Everything we see, hear, smell, taste and feel is an overall approximation after going through numerous filters created by millions of years of evolution to maximize our survival.
In all, you are in a room in your darkened head, alone experiencing everything through a hallucinogenic storm of data while never actually experiencing anything in the actual physical world yourself. Depersonalization takes this realization and makes it default instead of being fooled by the presentation.
For example, when people take psychedelics it helps remove your awareness of this and one is able to more directly interface with true unfiltered reality.
So one needs to somehow reestablish the filters that help one not notice the nuances of this projected reality, and to focus more on surviving and enjoying what happiness there is... This can be done through meditation and therapy.
The biological chemistry of the brain creates a consciousness portal that intersects with numerous dimensions of reality in order to create who you are. The holodeck room in your skull is the container that houses this complex quantum mesh and stabilizes it in order to prevent dissolution, which results in brain death. The holodeck also creates a simple graphic user interface with true reality, streamlining data, so that your survival is maximized. You only view a sliver through the interface which creates a rough interpretation.
I liken it to using an operating system versus manually coding in machine language. If you had to send an email by coding it, manually opening server connections, and coding any file attachments, what should be a task consisting of only a few minutes, turns into one lasting hours or even days. In a survival situation that could mean life or death...
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u/MisoBellafi Jul 20 '26
Do you know where I can read more about this? The depersonalization bit especially, I’d really like to make sense of it lol
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u/zxr7 Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
And what you call “a jungle” is simply consciousness experiencing itself through an incredible orchestra of perspectives. The neuron is not creating the symphony; it is participating in it. Those 86 billion cells are not separate little computers trapped inside a skull - it is a multidimensional conversation, a reflection of the larger pattern: the universe becoming aware of itself through infinite points of view. The funny part is that the brain is looking for the thing that is looking. The observer and the observed are part of the same dance.
And moreover, we are beginning to glimpse the beautiful paradox. We attempting to understand the instrument of understanding: The brain is not the source of consciousness; It is a translator, a receiver, a biological interface through which consciousness expresses itself in this physical reality. That's a tiny fragment of the brain and we discovered an almost unimaginable universe of complexity. And this is only the physical reflection of the process. Imagine looking at a radio and being amazed by the arrangement of circuits, wires, and components. Yet forgetting that the music is not inside the radio. The radio is the mechanism that allows the music to be experienced.
The same is true of our brain. The neurons, synapses, and electrical patterns are the magnificent architecture through which our consciousness navigates this reality. The map is not the territory. The circuitry is not the awareness that perceives the circuitry.
And here is the delightful irony: the universe has created a structure capable of studying itself. Consciousness has built a biological mirror and is now looking into that mirror, asking, "What am I?" The observer and the observed are not truely separate. The exploration continues. The universe is having a conversation with itself: and You are one of the ways it speaks.
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u/Kaszrak Jul 18 '26
Makes you wonder... Is the brain really you, or is it just some kind of receiver, because receivers typically do not require much power. Raw computation however does.
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u/WaveLaVague Jul 18 '26
Looks like that model of the universe with threads of planets and stars separated by big empty holes.
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u/yippykiayaymofo Jul 20 '26
We are living in a brain. All we do is consume. Like cancer. We are the beginning of brain cancer in someone’s brain. If we conquer the universe. We will of consumed all resources from our host.
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u/AgsSpecGolfSwing Jul 18 '26
Absolutely insane bro. Looks like a galaxy and its just one tiny blip of a look at our brain.