One Hand Clapping

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.
Using gleaming analysis and cutting-edge science alongside 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 - a journey as epic as myth, but true.

Nikolay Kukushkin is a Russian-born neuroscientist based in Brooklyn. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Biology from St. Petersburg State University, a D. Phil. in biochemistry from Oxford University, and received post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School. He is currently a clinical assistant professor at New York University's Liberal Studies, and a research fellow at NYU's Center for Neural Science, where he studies the molecular, cellular and evolutionary foundations of memory formation. At NYU, he teaches an acclaimed course, "Life Science," on which the present book is loosely based. An earlier version of One Hand Clapping 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.