The Extended Brain-Mind
When neuroscientists first discovered the Default Mode Network, nothing about it fit their expectations. They were studying task-driven activity, waiting for the brain to fall silent between actions, but instead they found a hidden organising field that remained active precisely when thought, effort, and intention dropped away. It was a background coherence that shaped everything else the brain did, a silent centre that set the tone for the entire mind. The more they studied it, the clearer it became that the DMN was not a structure but a relationship, a way the whole brain stabilised itself to create perception, selfhood, and meaning. Intelligence in the brain was not a single point; it was the pattern that emerged when the DMN held everything together in a coherent rhythm.
If there is a similar intelligence in the universe, we would never find it by searching for a location. Just as the DMN cannot be pointed to with a finger, the universe’s intelligence would have to appear as a coherence field, something revealed in cycles, rhythms, and alignments that do not drift. And this is where the ancient world quietly left a clue: the 24-hour star clock anchored by the rising of Regulus in the face of the Sphinx. The Egyptians did not invent a clock. They recognised a stable reference point between Earth and sky, a cosmic recurrence that allowed humans to measure time because time was already being measured by the universe itself. Every year, Regulus rose in the exact gaze of the Sphinx, fixing a single point on Earth to a single point in the sky, creating a natural zero-point from which the entire zodiac and planetary cycles could be organised.
In the same way the brain’s DMN provides the inner reference frame for how the mind knows itself, the Regulus–Sphinx alignment created an outer reference frame by which Earth could know the sky. It was a cosmic anchoring: a relationship, not a belief, where the rotation of the planet, the tilt of its axis, the fixed position of a star, and the orientation of a monument all locked together into a coherent pattern. Humans did not choose this alignment; they discovered it because the Earth itself is phase-locked into the geometry of the larger universe. This anchoring allowed the ancient sky-watchers to map planetary rhythms, decode precession, and recognise that the heavens moved like a vast, intelligent clock whose structure was already complete before any human culture existed to observe it.
Astrology emerged from this anchoring not as superstition but as pattern recognition. When a child takes its first breath, the brain’s DMN imprints a unique configuration that shapes the personality. When a child is born on Earth, the cosmic field imprints a timing pattern based on planetary positions, lunar cycles, and the orientation of the sky at that moment. It is not that the planets cause anything; it is that the entire system is coherent, and birth occurs inside this coherence, the same way neural identity arises inside the coherence of the DMN. The ancients intuited what neuroscience is now beginning to uncover: intelligence expresses itself not as a place but as a pattern, and both the brain and the universe rely on stable anchors to generate meaning.
The symmetry is almost too clean to ignore. The brain has a silent organising field, revealed when thought dissolves. The Earth has a silent organising field, revealed when one star rises in one ancient gaze. The DMN stabilises the inner world. The Regulus–Sphinx axis stabilises the outer world. Both create a framework in which cycles can be recognised, identity can be formed, and deeper intelligence can move through form without being reduced to it. When the mind becomes silent, it touches the coherence behind the DMN. When civilisation looked up and fixed the sky to the Sphinx, it touched the coherence behind the universe.
The pattern is the same at both scales. The intelligence of the brain emerges from its centre. The intelligence of the universe emerges from its rhythm. And in both cases, the centre is not a point but a relationship — an alignment between what is within and what is beyond — revealing a single coherence that has been here all along, waiting for us to notice it.
As above, so below.
