Behind the Poem: A Brief History of Interconnection

Curiosity led me to a question: Could the structure of the human brain mirror the structure of the cosmos? That spark became a poem (A Brief History of Interconnection.) But what fascinated me the most was the process. How search, generative tools, and visual thinking shaped the final piece.

This post documents that journey: from prompt to poem, from thought to visualisation.

💡 The spark

I’d been reading A Brief History of Intelligence by Max Bennett and noticing how often the human brain was surfacing in conversations about AI, especially in the podcasts I’d been listening to.

One night, I found myself thinking about neural networks and constellations, the number of neurons in the brain versus stars in the Milky Way. I remembered how the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN) looks a little like a star map.

🔍 The question (Google)

So I searched Google for:

“constellations like neural networks in brain”

The AI-generated response was surprisingly rich, conceptual, scientific, even poetic. It fired up my imagination.

The human brain's neural network and the cosmic web of galaxies share striking similarities in structure and organization, despite the vast differences in their scale and physical components. Both systems exhibit a complex, interconnected network of elements (neurons or galaxies) linked by filaments or connections, creating a hierarchical structure with clusters and branching patterns…

🪄 Generating the poem (ChatGPT)

I copied the entire response into ChatGPT and prompted it to:

Create a series of engaging, philosophical haikus based on the similarity between the human brain’s neural network and the cosmic web of galaxies. Use highly original, creative fresh language.

The haikus were good, but a little sterile. I’d recently been introduced to the writing of Anne Carson and was drawn to her fragmented, lyrical, and philosophical style. So I tried this:

Write a longer poem in the style of Anne Carson about this topic.

That prompt became A Brief History of Interconnection.

I didn’t edit the poem at all, it felt complete in its own way. A purely AI-generated artifact, it appealed to me with its quiet intensity.

🎨 Visuals (DALL·E)

To bring the poem to life visually, I asked ChatGPT to suggest illustration ideas for each section. I then used those prompts in DALL·E to generate accompanying artwork. These are moody, dreamlike watercolor and ink images that reflect the brain-galaxy metaphor running through the piece.