The Black Hole of the Brain: A Novel Energy-Based Therapeutic Perspective for Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract:

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is considered a devastating and often underrecognized global health burden. Despite extensive ongoing research, effective treatments remain limited by an incomplete understanding of its multifarious pathogenesis, more than a century since the first report of AD in 1906. This review proposes a novel conceptual framework that draws parallels between entropy- driven systemic collapse in physical systems and neurodegeneration in AD. Specifically, it highlights how entropy may lead to systemic collapse, whether in a dead star that forms a black hole or in an AD-afflicted brain region. Though differing in biological and physical scales, AD and black holes share analogous features, including rising entropy, irreversible degeneration, and system decay, that are fundamental to understanding their underlying physics. Both AD and black holes represent systems characterized by irreversible loss of structure, energy, and information. In AD, progressive neural death leads to cognitive impairment, synapse loss, and brain atrophy, reflecting impaired energy utilization and increasing entropy within neural networks. Similarly, a black hole forms from stellar collapse, where energy becomes gravitationally confined and entropy increases as information is lost beyond the event horizon. Diagnostic exploration of both phenomena relies on interpreting waves and signals, neuroimaging in the brain, and the detection of electromagnetic or gravitational waves in space, revealing how the breakdown of structure and the dissipation of accessible energy signify a fundamental loss of order in complex systems. This conceptual framework may help inspire innovative energy-based therapeutic approaches for AD before the disease reaches an irreversible stage of pathogenesis.