There's no way this is a coincidence.

On the left in all these pairs of images, which were gathered by the Infinity Imagined website, is a shot of a city at night, taken from the International Space Station. On the right is a scan of neurons in a human brain.

Despite the obvious difference in scale, the organization of a city seems to bear a striking resemblance to the organization of pathways in the mind.

The similarities are not just a coincidence, according to research conducted in 2009 by scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The researchers found that the human brain appears to develop very much like a city does.

"Natural selection has passively guided the evolution of mammalian brains throughout time, just as politicians and entrepreneurs have indirectly shaped the organization of cities large and small," Mark Changizi, a neurobiology expert who led the study, told Science Daily.

"It seems both of these invisible hands have arrived at a similar conclusion: brains and cities, as they grow larger, have to be similarly densely interconnected to function optimally," Changizi said.

And that's what lets us share cool stuff like this with you on the internet. Nice work, invisible hands.

Via: Petapixel

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