"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, who studies the miracle by which molecules form memories 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, Dr. 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"-- Provided by publisher.

"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. "-- Provided by publisher.