If you have spent any significant amount of time on this website, by now you may be asking the question, “Why are there pictures of stars and galaxies in the header and not a colorful/fancy model of a brain like 99.9% of all the other psychology web sites out there?”
For starters, Affect Engineering is not like every other psychology website.
Secondly, many of you have probably heard the popular, though erroneous claim that there are more neural connections in the brain than there are stars in the universe.
In fact, every time someone says, “There are more neural connections in the brain than stars in the universe,” an astronomer somewhere explodes… maybe not like a supernova or anything, but they probably burn a little on the inside. I may have exaggerated just a bit there.
Most estimates of the number of neurons in the adult human brain are around 80 billion to 100 billion, with some quadrillion neural connections between them (10 ^ 15 or 1,000,000,000,000,000).
Estimated Number of Neural Connections in the Brain
Against this, most estimates hold that there are around 100 billion galaxies in the universe of about 100 billion stars each (i.e. 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). That would put the estimated number of stars in the universe somewhere between a sextillion (10 ^ 21) and a septillion (10 ^ 24) stars.
Estimated Number of Stars in the Galaxy
The real answer is that nobody knows for certain. They are both impressively large. The making of a claim that one gargantuan value is bigger than an also gargantuan and unknown value is something that only a human would do. In short, I felt it more appropriate to include pictures of stars and celestial bodies in the header than another picture of a brain because these images capture the mystery of the mind better than a neon-lighted rendition of the nervous system, in my opinion.
As for why there are stars in the actual night sky, they are there for us to look at in wonder, to marvel at their vastness, and to dream up what stories they may hold.
