One Hand Clapping

Neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin reveals the miracle by which consciousness evolved out of the natural world from the birth of the cell to the majesty of our modern minds.

Like the Zen Buddhist riddle pondering the imponderable — the sound of a single hand clapping — One Hand Clapping asks the seemingly impossible question of how the human mind came to exist within physical reality. In search of this answer, Kukushkin takes readers on a billion-year journey to the roots of “nature’s ideas” which define a human being, from breathing and moving to wanting and liking. By simultaneously considering the origins of both the subjective and the objective sides of “humanness,” this revolutionary book embeds the very experience of being human, being alive, here, now, within a unified history of life on Earth.

Revealed by Kukushkin in vivid detail, this life on Earth is as incomprehensible as it is omnipresent, teeming with millions of legs, knots, thorns, and teeth among which we humans exist and from which we originate. For three and a half billion years life did so without us, and now, in the last moments of history, humanity has emerged from this menagerie of animals, plants, fungi, and microbes to ponder, for the first time, the nature of its own existence.

Using gleaming analysis, cutting-edge science, and whimsical 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. It turns out that dinosaurs are to blame for human suffering, lungs exist thanks to lichens, and the major event in the life of our ancestors over the last eon was the transformation into worms. One Hand Clapping is the story of humans and our inner worlds, spanning the entire journey from inorganic molecules to the emergence of language, told as a mythical epic.