One Hand Clapping: Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind - Hardcover

Kukushkin, Nikolay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 149309064X ISBN 13: 9781493090648

Publisher: Globe Pequot Press, 2025

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Nikolay Kukushkin is a Russian-born neuroscientist based in Brooklyn, NY, and is the author of the widely acclaimed One Hand Clapping, originally published in Russian in 2020. The book won the most prestigious book prize for Russian nonfiction, the Enlightener (Prosvetitel) Award, as well as the Alexander Belyaev Medal, awarded to the best Russian-language nonfiction and science fiction. Kukushkin is a clinical associate professor at New York University's Liberal Studies, and a research fellow at NYU's Center for Neural Science, where he studies the role of time patterns in memory formation. This book is loosely based on his acclaimed course at NYU, "Life Science." He holds degrees from St. Petersburg State University (Russia) and Oxford University, and received post-doctoral training at the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. He has authored and co-authored multiple publications in prestigious scientific journals (Neuron, PNAS, Nature Medicine) including a recent groundbreaking paper in Nature Communications demonstrating canonical memory in non-neural cells. Prior to leaving Russia he had spent much of his life facing political turmoil, from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 when he was 3 years old, to the poverty and instability of 1990s, to the rise of authoritarianism in the 2000s and 2010s, which culminated in the ongoing invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Edition details

• Publisher: Globe Pequot Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 149309064X
• ISBN 13: 9781493090648
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304