Cotton with one palm: how inanimate nature gave rise to the human mind

Life on Earth is incomprehensible, ubiquitous, teeming with millions of legs, knots, spines and teeth of Bacchanalia, in which we exist and from which we come from. For three and a half billion years she did without us, and now, in the last moments of history, a person emerges from this intricacies of animals, plants, mushrooms and microbes and wonders: who am I and what is the meaning of my human life? In his debut book, the evolutionary neurobiologist Nikolai Kukushkin, step by step, recreates a picture of the world from inanimate matter to the human mind in order to find answers to eternal questions in the past of his appearance. It turns out that dinosaurs are to blame for human suffering, lungs exist thanks to lichens, and the main event in the life of our ancestors over the last anon was a transformation into worms. "Cotton with one palm" is the story of man and his inner world, which contains all the way from inorganic molecules to the emergence of the language and told as if it were a knightly novel or a mythical epic.



Quotes



Language is something like an operating system. It is installed in the brain as software and allows it to be better controlled. We think in words, and how we have taught us how we think.



The very fact that we like something in the external environment, gradually makes us dependent on this external environment. Unexpected joys from which we feel good, over time, necessarily become expected needs, without which we are bad ... In general, in full accordance with the teachings of the Buddha: pleasure gives rise to desire, and desire gives rise to suffering.



Darwin - this is such a special character of any book about evolution, which always comes up with others before. He has a brother "even Darwin", also a man of large talents.



The very fact of the existence of life pushes it to solve problems facing it. If there is life, then it is either incorrectly propagated, or she has a problem that interferes with this. If there is a problem, a fundamental solution to the problem and time, then the problem will sooner or later be resolved.



In living nature, almost all starts with chance, but almost all accidents do not end with anything.



Man - it sounds proud. But for this pride - colossal in size, lightning -fast in movements, hot to the biochemical limits of the rational machine of our own body - we pay expensive. How much time, effort and resources does it take to grow just one full -fledged new person? At the same time, a thousand generations of insects manage to be born, live life, leave offspring and die.



Human communication is not just a series of reflexes, but an active thought process in which someone else"s organism, with its sensations, emotions and conclusions, is modeled within our own consciousness.



The biological meaning of memory is the prediction of the future on the basis of the past, and the biological meaning of thinking is the prediction of the general on the basis of a private one.



It is not easy to grab a person’s uniqueness. Dolphins and verbetes have words with different meanings. Birds can also learn complex combinations of signals, and whales even have cultural trends ... If a capable primacy can be placed in an accessible language environment at the right time, he, in principle, is able to absorb a language close to human. Nevertheless, this does not happen in nature: monkeys in the jungle do not teach other monkeys the complex sequence of conventional signs, from which new meanings can be made up. This happens only among people. <...> The uniqueness of man in living nature is that he is a product of not one, but two evolutions: ancient, genetic, and new, cultural.



If genes are what really lives, then words are an alternative form of life.



For whom

"The most beautiful emotion that we are given to test is a feeling of secrets, ”wrote Albert Einstein. This book is for those who know how to admire the secret nature. It is for those who are curious, who like to look for answers to questions, who are not afraid to meet unfamiliar words in their path and is able to approach a complex topic with a sense of humor, and to the world around with the Einstein sense of mysterious.



Expert reviews

I have been waiting for this book for ten years. Nikolai Kukushkin has a superhuman ability to keep huge arrays of information in his head, draw unexpected analogies between them, and then explain them on his fingers so that the reader thinks: "But how did I not notice this before? Now I understand about life in general! " You have several hours of intellectual orgasm, and then you will be excitedly retelling this text at all parties for a couple of months and enjoy a stunning success.

Asya Kazantseva, scientific journalist, laureate of the Award "Educator"

The book of Nikolai Kukushkin is a great success of the author and the joy for those who have to meet with her. What is she about? About the origins of what makes us people, about the border between me and not many. How to understand: where is the mechanism of thinking, and where is the thinking itself? What makes life alive? Fascinating, informative, popular and deep. Read! You will not regret!

Anna Kartsova, Doctor of Chemical Sciences, Professor of St. Petersburg State University, Honored Teacher of the Russian Federation





About the author

Nikolai Kukushkin - neurobiologist, specialist in molecular mechanisms and memory evolution. A graduate of St. Petersburg State University, a doctor of philosophy of Oxford University, was trained at the Harvard Medical School, now - a professor at New York University. The author and co-author of numerous scientific and popular science publications, including both Russian-speaking articles in the media ("knife", RIA Novosti, etc), and English-language work in prestigious reviewed magazines (Neuron, Nature Medicine, etc).
The book became the laureate of the Award Enlightener of 2020