It's impressive enough that our human brains are made up of the same 'star stuff' that forms the Universe, but a wild study published back in 2016 suggests that this might not be the only thing the two have in common.
Just like the Universe, our brains might be programmed to maximise disorder – similar to the principle of entropy – and our consciousness could simply be a side effect, the paper suggests.
The quest to understand human consciousness – our ability to be aware of ourselves and our surroundings – has been going on for centuries. Although consciousness is a crucial part of being human, researchers are still grappling with where it comes from, when it starts, and why we have it.
But the 2016 study, led by researchers from France and Canada, puts forward a new possibility: what if consciousness arises naturally as a result of our brains maximising their information content? In other words, what if consciousness is a side effect of our brain moving towards a state of entropy?
Entropy is basically the term used to describe the progression of a system from order to disorder. Picture an egg: when it's all perfectly separated into yolk and white, it has low entropy, but when you scramble it, it has high entropy - it's the most disordered it can be. READ MORE...
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