Most people are familiar with the concepts of one dimension, two dimensions, and three dimensions, known as1D, 2D, and 3D, respectively. Few people can stretch their imagination to understand 4D. But, what if the very thing that allows us to imagine a 4D world is, in itself, more complex than 4D? That’s right, our brain’s structure is so complex that it goes farther than 4D. A study published in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, in 2017, described the structure of our brain using algebraic topography, a branch of mathematics that can describe topology, geometric properties and spatial relations, of spaces. The study discovered that our brain’s structure is 5D, 6D, and all the way up to 11D.
These researchers, part of the Blue Brain Project and from institutions such as École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, found that the structures of the brain came from groups of neurons that form cliques. Each neuron was grouped in a specific way to form a specific type of geometric shape that could never happen by chance. More highly dimensional and complex structures were found in more evolved parts of our brain. The brain constantly reconstructs these structures to try and build as many high dimensional structures possible. One such example was when these researchers presented a stimulus to the brain tissue, both virtual and biological. They discovered that cliques of increasingly higher dimensions began to momentarily assemble in order to enclose any high dimensional holes, referred to as cavities. One of the researchers, Ran Levi, stated that it’s as if the brain reacts to stimulus by building a tower of cliques starting from 1D and getting progressively more complex.
The discoveries made from this research are leading to new types of inquires in neuroscience as the field has been struggling to answer various questions such as where memories are stored and does the complexity of the structures within the brain allow for more intricate tasks. The researchers from this study theorize that the answers may be found within the newly discovered neuron structures from this study.