Nikolay Kukushkin

One Hand Clapping (eBook, ePUB)

Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin reveals how consciousness evolved out of the natural world, from the birth of the cell to the majesty of our modern minds. Science says that you are nothing but a chemical reactiona collection of atoms and molecules, like rocks, paperclips, and everything else in the physical universe. But if that's so, where is the place in this world for your consciousness? In a word, why does it feel so special to be you? Like the Zen Buddhist riddle pondering the imponderablethe sound of a single hand clappingOne Hand Clapping asks the seemingly unanswerable question of how the human mind came to exist within the material world. In search of an answer, neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin takes readers on a billion-year journey through time from the roots of our existence to the advent of Homo sapiens, reimagining the story of our evolution. The result is an exhilarating book that embeds our consciousness within a single, unified story of life on Earth. Illuminated by Kukushkin's revolutionary account of what makes us what we are, the so-called "hard problem" of consciousnessthe mystery by which our first-person feelings arise from the brainevaporates like a dream. Instead, the book reveals the deep continuity between our consciousness and nature itself. A work of ambitious intellectual scope, One Hand Clapping is distinguished as much by its originality as by the breadth of its imaginative reachdrawing from neuroscience, evolution, philosophy, and a rich tapestry of cultural references, all brought to life by the author's own whimsical illustrations. Told with the drama and daring of a mythical epic, it reaches deep into our oceanic past to show for the first time how the entire course of Earth's history, from the earliest nonliving particles, ultimately led to the formation of our own minds. In a time of technological confusion, Kukushkin's book is an ode to the human beingan unfolding of Nature itself, blessed with the gift to contemplate the world and to hear the sound of one hand clapping.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Simon + Schuster LLC
• Seitenzahl: 288
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. Oktober 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781493090655
• Artikelnr.: 75603057

Autorenporträt

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.

Inhaltsangabe

 
Prologue
Part 1. Where Everything Came From
Chapter 1. In the beginning were the letters
Chapter 2. A good idea
Chapter 3. The Birth of Complexity
Chapter 4. When all else fail
Part 2. Where We Came From
Chapter 5. The Moving Kingdom
Chapter 6. Land!
Chapter 7. When the World Ends
Chapter 8. The Mirror
Part 3. Where I came from
Chapter 9. Animals of abstraction
Chapter 10. Fire from Within
Chapter 11. The Dark Room
Chapter 12. In the Beginning was the Word
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
References