Divine nerves

Years ago I had read some oriental literature discussing an idea relating the cosmological and the quantum. "As above, so below", the saying goes. With this in mind a possible connection between urban growth patterns and nerve cell structures came to mind. Below are two images, a nerve bundle and a high level overview of a city.





Nerve tissue





Urban sprawl

Notice how the road patterns resemble the random directions of nerve tissue. Obviously, the analogy only goes so far. Urban sprawl is essentially a two dimensional pattern, even though geography allows some 3 dimensionality. Nerve tissue is a 3 dimensional form. Nonetheless, I began to wonder about this pattern, centralized, outwardly expanding natural patterns. In addition to the relationship between nerves and urban sprawl were trees, rivers, fractal patterns, glacial and ice movements. These all had the same kind of branching physical structures. In reality, these are more self-similar than the urban development-nerve pattern. That being said, this pattern repeats so much, I just found it fascinating and keep noticing how it keeps reappearing across a wide range of scales, from the cellular to the geographical.

So, with the pattern being noted, I began to wonder if, assuming the scale of space and time are similar, nervous tissue is microscopic and develops very quickly. Likewise, the urban sprawl patterns would grow over time very slowly in proportion to the massive scale of cities. In the two pictures shown above, a nerve bundle is about 100 micrometers. A city, such as New York, is roughly 100 kilometers across. So, the size relationship is 1 to 100000000000. So, if that is the case, the amount of time it takes for full urban development should be proportional to the length of time it takes for nerves to form. Still looking for that number.

Just some interesting observations...