One Hand Clapping: The Origin Story of the Human Mind

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 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--One 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 consciousness--the mystery by which our first-person feelings arise from the brain--evaporates 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 reach--drawing 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 being--an unfolding of Nature itself, blessed with the gift to contemplate the world and to hear the sound of one hand clapping.

Dr.Nikolay Kukushkin is a Russian-born neuroscientist based in Brooklyn, NY, and is the author of the widely acclaimed One Hand Clapping: How inanimate nature created the human mind, 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.

Dr. Kukushkin is 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. 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 including Neuron, PNAS, and Nature Medicine.

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.