Life as a Neuron: The Ubiquitous Struggle for Relevance
When a friend of mine lost her job, she entered a strange kind of limbo. Each day she sent out résumés like neurons firing into the void, waiting for one connection to spark. Watching her, I was reminded of how the brain develops, how trillions of synapses bloom, only for most to be pruned away. Survival, at every level, depends on finding resonance.
Like every cell in the body, a neuron is a living creature in miniature. It must eat, breathe, and maintain its internal balance. But unlike most cells, a neuron’s survival depends almost entirely on communication. Its lifeline is activity. When a neuron’s signals contribute to meaningful patterns of firing, it receives chemical nourishment (trophic factors) from its partners. When it falls silent, those lifelines wither. A neuron that fails to participate in resonant activity begins to die, not from neglect by the organism, but from irrelevance within its own network. Its niche is functional connection, and its struggle for survival is the struggle to matter within the vast society of the brain.
Resonance, in this sense, is not a metaphor for harmony but for participation in a self-sustaining pattern. In physics, resonance occurs when two oscillating systems begin to reinforce each other’s motion. In the brain, the idea is similar. A neuron’s signals reverberate through circuits; if those signals help stabilize a useful pattern, like the recognition of a face or the smooth reach for a cup, they strengthen the connections that made them possible. The network begins to sing in unison. Synapses that fail to join this song fall silent and are eventually retracted.
But true resonance in the brain is not just simultaneous activity; it is dialogue. Neural signals do not flow in one direction, from the senses upward into abstraction, and stop there. They oscillate. Lower levels send impulses forward, carrying raw information about edges, movements, or tones. Higher levels respond by sending predictions back, confirmations or corrections that test whether the incoming data fits a known pattern. When the upward flow of evidence and the downward flow of expectation align, a loop closes. Activity stabilizes. For a brief interval (what we experience as a moment) perception holds steady. This is resonance: a rhythmic conversation between hierarchical levels of abstraction, sustained just long enough for the world to cohere.
The same architecture appears everywhere that complexity organizes itself into layers. In each domain: neurons in circuits, minds in communities, companies in economies, the traffic between levels flows both ways. The lower levels generate novelty and noise; the higher levels impose coherence and constraint. Stability emerges only when both are engaged, when prediction and feedback form a mutual lock. And at every level, the agents below struggle to stay in that loop, to remain relevant to the patterns that sustain them. A neuron that fails to join a resonance is pruned. An employee who cannot contribute to a company’s function is let go. A company that cannot meet the demands of its market dissolves. Survival is always a negotiation with the levels above.
This recursive pattern, signals flowing upward in abstraction and downward in confirmation, is not unique to brains. It is how stability itself emerges in a universe that never stops changing. Wherever patterns endure, something like Darwinism is at work.
At its core, Darwinism is not about genes or species. It is about persistence through selection. Entities vary, interact, and leave traces of themselves in the future; those that fit the surrounding conditions best are the ones that remain. In living systems, this logic manifests as natural selection. In neural systems, as synaptic pruning. In social systems, as economic and cultural competition. Each is a version of the same universal process: the struggle for relevance within a hierarchy of constraint.
A neuron’s relevance lies in whether its activity contributes to a resonant circuit. A person’s relevance lies in whether their actions sustain the coherence of a group. A company’s relevance lies in whether its outputs serve the demands of its market. Each exists within a niche, an abstract level of organization that rewards participation and prunes what falls silent.
Seen in this light, resonance and Darwinism describe two faces of the same principle. Resonance is selection in motion: the real-time stabilization of patterns that work. Darwinism is resonance extended through time: the historical accumulation of patterns that have worked. Both describe how structure endures in a universe otherwise governed by entropy.
Persistence, in a dynamic universe, requires a mechanism for holding form against flux. That mechanism is resonance. A resonance is, by definition, the sustained reinforcement of a pattern through feedback. When oscillations align, their amplitudes build rather than cancel; their coherence endures through time. In that sense, resonance is not merely an analogy for persistence, it is persistence, the sustained reinforcement of form through interaction.
Every enduring structure, from atoms to organisms to cultures, depends on such reinforcement. In physics, resonance allows orbits, waves, and standing patterns to persist amid constant motion. In biology, it allows neural circuits and ecosystems to stabilize despite continual change in their components. In human life, it allows relationships, institutions, and ideas to persist through mutual validation. In every case, persistence is resonance extended through time, a dynamic equilibrium of reinforcement that keeps form alive within change.
Across scales, then, the same story repeats. Patterns arise, interact, and either dissolve or persist. What endures does so not because of destiny or design, but because it has found a way to remain relevant within a web of mutual reinforcement. It can be tempting to say that the universe “learns” which patterns to keep, but that is only a figure of speech. There is no learner behind the process, only structures that manage, through feedback, to keep existing. Still, the effect is the same: as unstable forms vanish and stable ones accumulate, complexity builds upward. What remains at any given moment is what has, in effect, survived the audition for relevance.
From this view, life itself is not an exception to the laws of nature but their most elaborate consequence. A living system is simply a pattern that has become good at maintaining its coherence in the face of change. Whether it is a neuron finding its place in a circuit, a person finding their role in a community, or a culture finding equilibrium with its environment, the underlying struggle is the same: to participate in resonances that last long enough to matter.
When my friend found her new job, I could almost feel the hum return. She had reentered a network of exchanges where her actions mattered again, where her efforts resonated with those of others to produce something larger than any single person. Her sense of meaning came back with that resonance, as though a circuit had closed. The pattern of her days stabilized, her energy amplified by feedback from the world. Watching this, I realized that the same rule governing a neuron’s survival governs ours: relevance is resonance, and resonance is persistence. To keep existing within a changing universe is to keep finding the patterns that keep us going, to join the harmonies that will still be sounding tomorrow.