Galaxy Brain meme template

What it means

Galaxy Brain is the name under which the Expanding Brain format is best known, a multi-panel ladder in which a brain glows ever larger beside a list of ever more outlandish ideas. It grew out of the January 2017 whomst joke on Reddit, where escalating fake-intellectual spellings of who were paired with increasingly cosmic brains. The joke is always ironic: the brightest, most transcendent brain belongs to the worst and most absurd take, so the format mocks reasoning that dresses itself up as enlightenment. Galaxy brain has since escaped the template entirely and become slang, used to describe any plan or argument that sounds brilliant in its own head and is ridiculous everywhere else. The more steps in the ladder, the better the payoff.

When to use it

• Ranking takes from reasonable to cosmically unhinged
• Ironically celebrating a terrible idea as peak intelligence
• Mocking overcomplicated logic that impresses only itself