One Hand Clapping

‘Brilliant, bold and beautifully articulated’ Karl J. Friston, Professor of Neuroscience, University College London

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.

Science says that you are nothing but a chemical reaction – a 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 imponderable – the sound of a single hand clapping – this book 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.

A work of ambitious intellectual scope, One Hand Clapping is distinguished as much by its originality as by the breadth of its imaginative reach – drawing from neuroscience, evolution, philosophy and a rich tapestry of cultural references, all brought to life by the author’s own 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 non-living particles, ultimately led to the formation of our own minds.