Nikolay Kukushkin at the Harvard Science Center

Harvard Book Store, the Harvard University Division of Science, and the Harvard Library welcome Nikolay Kukushkin—neuroscientist and clinical associate professor at New York University’s Liberal Studies—for a discussion of his book One Hand Clapping: Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind, which originally published in Russian in 2020 and won the most prestigious book prize for Russian nonfiction, the Enlightener (Prosvetitel) Award, as well as the Alexander Belyaev Medal. This event will take place at the Harvard Science Center, Hall C, located at 1 Oxford St, Cambridge. Following the presentation will be a book signing.

There are two ticket options available for this event.

Free General Admission Ticket: Includes admission for one.

Book-Included Ticket: Includes admission for one and one hardcover copy of One Hand Clapping.

Note: Books bundled with tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand. Ticket holders who purchased a book-included ticket and are unable to attend the event will be able to pick up their book at Harvard Book Store up to 30 days following the event. This offer expires after 30 days. Please note we cannot guarantee signed copies will be available to ticket holders who do not attend the event.

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.

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. By simultaneously considering the origins of both the subjective and the objective sides of “humanness,” this revolutionary book embeds the very experience of being human, being alive, here, now, within a unified history of life on Earth.

Revealed by Kukushkin in vivid detail, this life on Earth is as incomprehensible as it is omnipresent, teeming with millions of legs, knots, thorns, and teeth among which we humans exist and from which we originate. For three and a half billion years life did so without us, and now, in the last moments of history, humanity has emerged from this menagerie of animals, plants, fungi, and microbes to ponder, for the first time, the nature of its own existence.

Using gleaming analysis, cutting-edge science, and whimsical 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, told as a mythical epic.

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.

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.

The Harvard Science Book Talks series is a collaboration between the Harvard University Division of Science, the Harvard Library, and Harvard Book Store. The series features talks by the authors of recently published books on a variety of science-related topics and is open to both the Harvard community and to the general public.

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