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Expanding Brain

An escalation where each step is more elaborate and less sensible.

Read literally it is a ranking: each panel is supposedly more enlightened than the one above. Used well it is the opposite — the escalation is real but the improvement is not, and the final panel is the most elaborate and the stupidest.

The last panel carries the joke. The first three are setup and should be written quickly; the reader is scanning down to see where it lands.

It also works completely straight, as a genuine progression from naive to sophisticated. That version is less funny and more useful — it is a good shape for explaining something.

Where the captions go

The numbered rectangles are where the text actually belongs on this template, measured against the real image rather than guessed from the panel count. These are the same coordinates the editor uses.

#	What goes here	Position (px)	Size (px)	Tilt
1	Small brain	9, 12	403 × 264	—
2	Glowing brain	9, 313	403 × 276	—
3	Cosmic brain	9, 613	403 × 252	—
4	Universe brain	9, 902	403 × 288	—

Common mistakes

A genuine, sincere improvement at every step. Fine for teaching, flat as a joke.
Four panels of equal weight. Front-load the setup, spend the words on the last one.
Trying to fit a sentence per panel — the boxes are shallow and the text shrinks fast.

Where it comes from

A four-panel sequence of increasingly luminous brain scans, in circulation since 2017.

Open this template in the editor

The template image is served from imgflip's public template API. If you hold rights in it and want it removed, see about & takedowns.

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