Earth is 8000 miles in diameter and orbits the sun at 66,000 miles per hour (Bloom, 2001). It spins (rotates) 25,142.9 miles (its circumference) every 24 hours. This planet (at the equator) is consequently spinning at over a 1000 miles per hour! Although it is estimated that for every grain of sand on earth there are more stars in the galaxies, it’s also been estimated there are “more connections within the human brain than there are particles in the known universe” (McGilchrist, 2009, p9) and the brain has “a hundred billion nerve cells called neurons and many more support cells” (Arden, 2010, p3). According to Damasio (1994) “every neuron forms about 1,000 synapses, although some can have as many as 5,000 or 6,000 … there are more than 10 trillion synapses” p29. A hundred billion nerve cells is equivalent to the stars in our galaxy yet in our heads we are into the trillions of connections. We all then could be carrying a massively expanded version of this connectivity within our galaxy in our heads. Try and stay with that for a moment.
But more stars than grains of sand, and more connections within the human brain than particles in the known universe? Perhaps instead of saying I can’t comprehend this, try not thinking about it, but try and ‘feel’ the enormity of that. We all carry this capacity around. How insignificant are we really in the scheme of things and yet at the same time how enormously potentially powerful could each of us be? What an absolutely amazing organ is the brain?
Sagan (2003) even calculated the number of probable planets in the universe at ten billion trillion, the chances of randomly being on one as less than one in a billion, trillion trillion, that is 1 in 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 1 in 1033 which immediately places gambling odds in staggeringly more favourable contexts. He states “if we were randomly inserted into the universe, the chances you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion” p26.
To give some understanding to these way ‘out there’ probabilities Davies (1990) proposed that if the ‘big bang’ was out by just one part in 1060 then the universe as we know it would not have formed. He suggested “suppose you wanted to fire a bullet at a one inch target on the other side of the observable universe twenty billion light years away, you would need to be accurate to one part in 1060 ” p179. Being mindful of some of these calculations can be only a very humble beginning in our quest to gain some perspective on the reality of being here; how unlikely the universe really is to have formed the way it has; how important yet insignificant we are; how precious life perhaps really is yet how little we appreciate any of this.
At Mind Management Psychology having a time to deliberately reflect and appreciate some of this each day is an opportunity to cultivate something special, a relationship with something that is completely self-managing, amazingly unlikely to have formed with a complexity not disimiliar to each of our brains. A kind of relationship with yourself. With practise there is a something very special going on. And very big; that’s our amazing universe! It manages itself, and yes, your mind can to as long as it’s trained.