One Hand Clapping

Explore the miracle by which molecules make memories in this journey through the evolution of consciousness from the birth of the cell to the majesty of our modern minds.

In order for us to hear, see, or feel anything, surely there must be a me, and there must be a non-me. A hand representing us humans, and another hand representing nature, against which we impact and imprint. But Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin and his work at NYU's Center for Neural Science reveals that this is an illusion. There are not two hands, but only one, and no one and nothing can be separated from nature as a whole - we are all part of it. To understand what is special about the human experience, we must see what the human experience means from the vantage point of nature as a whole. And to get there, we must start at the very origin of life.

In One Hand Clapping, Kukushkin traces the history of human lineage from the foundation of the animal kingdom to the birth of modern Homo sapiens, at each step uncovering how the remarkable choices made by our ancestors over billions of years ultimately shaped our consciousness. Our journey through eons will proceed in stages that are not simply geological eras, nor successive branches on the evolutionary tree of life, but rather stages in the slow crystallization of "nature's ideas" arriving at the stupendous capacities of our own minds, here and now. As time passed, these ideas became progressively more specific, nesting into each other like a set of Russian nesting dolls: being alive, being animal, being human, being a self. When we reveal the entire picture - and thus glimpse the human experience from the vantage point of nature - we see that what makes us different from the rest of the world are the very same things that we contribute to its flow. What we think separates us from nature, in fact, makes us inseparable from it.

By finding and preserving patterns of ongoing reality, our brains do over our lifetimes what bacteria do over millions of years: distill a diverse range of experiences into optimal decisions. Through gleaming analysis, cutting-edge neuroscience, and happily helpful doodles from the author, this elegant and absorbing book reaches deep into our oceanic past to show how the evolution of the most basic features of cells and molecules at the dawn of life on Earth ultimately led to the formation our own minds.