Instant Genius - How human consciousness emerged from the fundamental processes of nature

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

Thanks to hundreds of years of scientific progress we now know, that like every other living thing on Earth, human beings are simply assemblages of atoms and molecules that evolved over eons through a series of complex, iterative processes. But somewhere along this long and meandering journey we developed consciousness – the deep sense of self-awareness that allows us to think, feel and even allows us to attempt to understand what’s going on in the Universe around us. In this episode, we’re joined by neuroscientist and author Dr Nikolay Kukushkin to talk about his latest book, One Hand Clapping – Unravelling the Mystery of the Human Mind. He tells us how this entire process all started millions of years ago through the interactions of atoms such as carbon and oxygen, how taking a bottom-up approach to the development of consciousness can help to explain how human beings became such complicated entities and how the advent of artificial intelligence may, or may not, influence the future evolution of our species. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. Thanks to hundreds of years of scientific progress, we now know that like every other living thing on Earth, human beings are simply assemblages of atoms and molecules that evolved over eons through a series of complex, iterative processes. But somewhere along this long and meandering journey,

we developed consciousness, the deep sense of self-awareness, that allows us to think, feel, and even attempt to understand what's going on in the universe around us. In this episode, we're joined by neuroscientist and author Dr. Nicolay Kukushkin to talk about his latest book, One Hand Clapping, Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind. He tells us how this entire process all started millions of years ago through the interactions of atoms such as carbon and oxygen. How taking a bottom-up approach to the development of consciousness can help to talk to, explain how human beings became such complicated entities, and how the advent of artificial

intelligence may or may not influence the future evolution of our species. So welcome to the podcast, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. So today we're talking about your book, One Hand Clapping, Unravelling the Mystery of the Human Mind. So the kind of main thread that I got running through the book is the question, this really deeply interesting question that under the microscope, we know that we're all collections of cells and within the cells there are all sorts of chemical reactions occurring. But on the human being level,

we're capable of complex thoughts, feelings, have distinct personalities, even opinions, and a sense of self. So this must be one of the most fundamental questions in science. So what led you to take it on? Of course, and it's not just one of the most fundamental questions of science, but I would say it's a fundamental question of human existence. We think deeply that there is this wall between me, myself, my inner view from the inside and this outer world, whether it's made of molecules or cells or just objects and weights and things. But we think that there's this distinction between myself and the rest of the world. And the book really is about the fact that when you zoom into it and you try to figure out where the distinction lives, where is this wall, what is it made of? It disappears. It dissolves.

But to see how it dissolves, it requires an entire journey from the simplest components of the human being, from the atoms and molecules and cells to larger components to who we are through. being an animal, being a multicellular creature even, to being a mammal, being a primate, you need to understand all of those levels to really grasp where is this feeling of being you come from? Yeah, that's something that I thought was really interesting, because a lot of psychology is based on starting when how we're thinking, what we're thinking, and then trying to go sort of down the ladder, if that makes sense. But here, you're starting a sort of first principle, and coming back up, which I found really interesting.

So what are the advantages of taking that approach? That is exactly right. I think that most people start, the way that I put it, is from the top down. They start from me, from these complicated things, my opinions, beliefs, emotions, what I experience from the inside. And then, if they are interested in neuroscience, they try to get a little deeper. They try to get into the brain and see, okay, where are all of these things in brain circuits? in cells, even maybe in molecules if you're really committed to the question.

But I think this limits us because we are searching for things that we invented in words and they may not actually correspond to anything real. I'll give one example that I really love. It comes from Yerebusaki. He wrote this article about

the language of neuroscience being derived from what he calls folk psychology, these traditional words that we used to describe things like happiness or or motivation, all these words, they precede neuroscience. They've existed long before we knew anything about the brain. And he says, here's this one phenomenon, this one brain activity called a theta wave, a theta wave. It's a particular oscillation, tater rhythm.

It's a particular oscillation of electrical pulse in the brain. between the hippocampus and the cortex. There is this electrical pulsing that has a particular rhythm. And for decades, people have been trying to figure out what this pulsing means. And there are articles that say, oh, this is a rhythm for memorization. Oh, no, this is a rhythm for attention. No, this is a rhythm for head direction control. No, this is a rhythm for body positioning.

The reality is that the brain only knows that this is this rhythm, and all of these different terms that we come up with are just different implementations of this one brain mechanism. So this is an example when we're searching for these top-down words in biological reality, and we can't figure out what it is, but the reality is that the words are made up, and it will be a lot more helpful to define all of these different things, attention and memory, through the tator rhythm itself from the bottom up. And that's my perspective because I am actually not trained as a neuroscientist. I don't come from psychology. I am biochemists and cell biologists by training. So my background has always been small things, the little things, the molecules, the molecular

machines. When I think of biology in general, I start from within the cell. I imagine myself sitting inside of a cell and I imagine all the different organelles floating around me, all the molecules and from there I look into the outside world. So my interest has always being not how do I break down these complicated things into small components, but how do I start with the components and build up complicated things from those? And that is this alternative approach, the bottom-up approach. And I think neuroscience requires both. I think you need to have both approaches and meet in the middle. I I think that's what my book tries to do.

It's not ignoring how we look at the world. But it's starting from both ends. It takes the reader from the bottom of, from atoms, carbon and oxygen, two, two more and more complicated things. And then at the same time, it starts from the top down, from how we look at the world. And then it aims to find where these two perspectives meet. And maybe if we find that point where they meet, maybe we will see that there is no wall between them. So we'll talk about the sort of atomic level there with, like, as you mentioned, carbon and oxygen.

But first off, you talk about something that you term as an essence. So I think we should have a talk about that. What exactly do you mean by an essence? It's an interesting history of this term and how it ended up in this book, because the book was previously published in Russia a few years ago and it did pretty well. It still sells nicely. but in that version of a book, I did not use the word essence

and I was really pressed on it when I was translating the book because I think it sounds more confusing in English. When you talk about what I called in the book Nature's Ideas, I use this word idea for two things. One, the idea that we humans might have in our mind when I close my eyes and think of

that's what I'm going to have for dinner. Great idea. That's one idea. but you could also think of ideas as nature's ideas, ideas that don't exist in our mind, but ideas that are built into the very fabric of the world. For example, the book starts with carbon and oxygen, and we think of them as these dull chemical elements

that are soulless, that are just basically numbers. But in reality, each chemical element has an idea behind it, it has its superpower, its ability that sets it apart from other elements. For example, carbon. Carbon is uniquely cooperative. Carbon is this one element that can form up to four bonds with other elements, including other carbons. That's really rare. That's really unusual. That is that an atom could be so cooperative.

So you could say that this idea, this idea of cooperativity, of building things, of being constructive. This idea exists within this atom of carbon. Regardless of what we think of it, that's just what it is. It would have been like this. It is like this on any other planet, not just on Earth.

So it was useful in the English version of the book to distinguish between these two things, the idea that exists in the human mind, and the idea as a pattern of nature. And I was looking for a word to call these ideas of nature, I reached out to my colleague, a philosopher here at liberal studies at NYU, Phil Washburn. And he, you know, I said, what is a word in philosophy that would refer to to things like this?

I'm sure that somebody has come up with a concept like that before. And he said, yeah, Plato did. Plato, Plato used this word, Aidos, which means basically what do you mean by nature's ideas. And this word is usually translated as essence. So that's what we went with. Essences are nature's ideas. and ideas are human ideas. But at the risk of giving up the cliffhanger,

the fun part of the book, I'll reveal that what the book is leading up to is that these human ideas that we think are so distinct and unique and separate from the fabric of the world are also essences. They are, in fact, also nature's ideas, just highly convoluted, highly complicated,

highly compressed nature's ideas. and that is what makes us special and conscious. So I was wondering if the concept of the essence came up from sort of most scientists, at least, natural reversion to anthropomorphizing things. I mean, am I right there? Absolutely. Some people would say that by giving atoms this soul, you are being unscientific. You are making it like a little human, and that's not what an atom is.

But I think that what I'm doing when I'm saying this is I am just simply making a metaphor. I am not suggesting that an atom is a mini-human. I am suggesting that there are patterns in nature that exist regardless of what we think of them. And ignoring those patterns is not only unhelpful, but it takes away from the most delightful thing about nature, that it makes sense. If we ignore it making sense, then you are just watching a baseball game without knowing the rules. Understanding what is happening in Earth and why it is happening, that is what makes it fun. So let's take a bit of a leap here from individual atoms to another sort of massively important brick in the wall of anything living, which is the cell. So you talk quite a lot about cells and multicellularity.

organisms, etc. Can you unpick that for us? Absolutely. I think that as humans we tend to believe that we are the most perfect creatures. That's just what we think. And we think that everybody else wants to be like us. We take this for granted. And from there comes this impression that we somehow won evolution. We managed to do things that nobody else could. We just did this great of a job. But really, if you consider how evolution progresses, being multicellular, being complex, it's not necessarily about winning. It's not that being large or multicellular is inherently better than being single-celled. Most organisms are still single cells.

They have been single cells for most history of life on Earth. There haven't been multicellular organisms for that long. So really, life is cells, it's individual cells. And sometimes there's this occasional group that makes these crazy. bloated multicellular organisms. It's not that that's better. That's just what you do when you run out of all the other options. That's the way that we need to think about this.

And so, in fact, it's not that bacteria didn't manage to create consciousness because they evolved so badly. No, it's just that bacteria have already taken over all the possible niches, all the basic options. They've covered all the space of possibilities in the world. And to fit into this world, that was already taken. over by these extremely successful organisms. We had to come up with something completely abnormal and ridiculously bloated and very, very complicated. That's the route that we took. And I think that

this route begins in a very particular moment. I think we don't talk about this enough. It seems like something that is a very deep cut of a science textbook. But I think it really is this key moment in what will eventually become humanness. And that is the origin of, of our domain. People who don't even know this word domain. There are three domains in life, three domains that are three big continents of life's diversity.

Bacteria, which is another exotic continent, and eukaryotes. That's ourselves. And this birth of eukaryotes, it happened after the other two domains. We came later. And I think this is the key moment in our history

because these eukaryotes, what they could do that no other organism, no bacteria or archaea could do, what they figured out, this new possibility that they figured out in this world of bacteria archaea is you could eat other organisms. It wasn't possible before. This became their thing. They could steal energy away from someone else and turn that into themselves. And they could become more complex as a result of that.

But as they become more complex, they need to keep eating more and more and not be eaten. And that sets up this arms race where you're constantly worried about getting enough energy to sustain your complexity and not getting destroyed by somebody else who has even more complexity. That is the entire trajectory of eukaryotic evolution that happens after that point. This one moment, that's this complex cell that eats other cells appears, and then snowballs into everything else onto large and complex and beautiful and multicellular and thinking forms of life that, that now exist and that culminates, culminates eventually, almost predictably in the birth of the human species. Once you have the cell that trades massive amounts of energy for massive amounts of complexity and never gets enough of energy to sustain enough complexity, you can almost expect that eventually there is going to be someone who extracts energy even from atoms

and teeters in the brink of self-annihilation, but still can't get enough energy. And that's really what we humans are. Peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month.

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This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology, and acoustic engineering. balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking.

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which are much less sort of complex cellulary than we are. And you mentioned things like sea slugs and is it nematodes and things like that, which we still used to study now. You know, what can we say about those in this step? And what can we still learn from them? Well, we already talked about these two perspectives. right, the top-down perspective on your mind, on your consciousness that most people naturally start with. And this alternative, the bottom-up, where you start with small components and you see how you can get to yourself, to your inner world.

And other animals, simpler animals like sea slugs, they are very, very helpful on this journey. I think it is much more helpful to start with a sea slug than, for example, a mouse. We think that a mouse is a very simple organism, somewhere halfway between us and bacteria, but it's not. A mouse is practically a human. It's basically the same animal. Add a couple of little tweaks and you get a human.

That's why we like to do experiments on mice because they're so similar to us, whatever we learn from them is directly applicable to ourselves. They're very close to us. That's why we experiment on them. If you experiment on a mouse, you're trying to understand the human, typically. If you want to understand brain,

in general or animals in general or life forms in general. You have to move away from mice and humans because they're very, very unusual, very strange animals. Sea slugs though, sea slugs are much more normal animals. A typical animal is much slower than us. We don't think about ourselves as being particularly fast, but we are some of the fastest creatures that this planet has produced. We are some of the largest creatures that the planet has produced in the

the animal kingdom. Again, we think of whales, giraffes, but those are just a few select extra large examples, whereas really, compared to everybody else, we vertebrates in general are giants, everybody, even rats are giants compared to the majority of animals. Sea slugs are smaller, mostly made of water. That's a more, much more normal size, normal size, normal speed, normal intelligence, normal behaviors. That's what you want, if you want to understand how brains evolved, where they come from? What do they mean from nature's perspective? What is the essence of a brain? What is the nature's idea behind it? I think that looking at mice, kind of clouds are a view. So, for example, when people talk about memory in sea slugs, that's what I study, or memory in kidney

cells, what we've now transitioned to is studying memory in non-brain cells, we find that even kidney cells, cells that have nothing to do with the brain, they actually form memories using the same molecular tools, same genes, same signaling molecules inside those cells, as brain cells do when they form memories when we study for class. So this mechanism of memorizing really is spread between cells and precedes this idea of a neuron or a brain. It's a much more ancient and universal process. But usually, people have a real trouble talking about the cellular memory or C-slug memory without using quotation marks. They say, okay, well, that's memory, it's sort of, it's like memory, but it's not

really a memory. It's not, it's not, it's not the memory that I think of when I close my eyes and think about yesterday. But people have no problem doing that with a mouse, even though really, you have no idea what's happening in the mind of a mouse. Old neuroscience does experience, with mice and all that they can measure is when that mouse stopped moving or turned in the maze and that's what you know and based on that you make an inference well it froze we shocked it yesterday and so it must be scared it must be experiencing this fear and that's a reasonable inference because the mouse is so similar to you it has all the same brain parts if you see that this brain part is activated chances are it's probably experiencing something similar as we would so yes you can do

that, but when you do that with a sea slug, there are no brain parts that correspond to your brain parts. So what does it even mean for a sea slug to be scared or to experience pain? People ask me, do they feel pain? Well, it looks like they feel something. They move away from you poking them. But there is just no way of establishing, do they have this thing that we have? because you're moving from the top down, because you're trying to look for something that only exists in your particular brain in another brain, and you're not finding it, and that makes you feel like there's something about you that's fundamentally distinct. But that's not necessarily the case. It is a gradual progression. And if you move from the other side, from the bottom up,

you see how these simple patterns that C-Slock brain accumulates gradually transition into more complicated patterns that maybe a fish would accumulate and those gradually transition into even more and more complicated patterns and those eventually become the fabric of our mind. For example, you know, what I mean by patterns? What I mean by patterns of the world? What we are physically perceiving is there's light and there's darkness. Sometimes there's light, sometimes it's darkness. But we live in this world for a little bit and we notice that there's a pattern that this light and darkness it comes in cycles. And so we come up with this concept of a day, and we have this concept in our mind.

And then we keep watching this, and we notice that over even longer periods of time, these days get longer or shorter, colder, or warmer, and we come up with a pattern of patterns, and we call it a year, and we then have that unit in our mind. So our minds can do that almost to infinity. They can extract patterns of patterns, of patterns, of patterns, of patterns, of patterns, of patterns of patterns and from that, from that we are made. Seaslock brains can also do that, except they extract very simple patterns, much simpler than ours.

It's a quantitative difference. It's not a fundamental difference. So it's essentially a matter of scale and time, I suppose. Yes, I would argue that as a matter of scale, time. Time is brain's fundamental currency. If you think about what brain cells know about the outside world, all that they physically receive from that outside world is time. Once your eye receives some photons.

So some light shines on your eyes. From a screen, there's an LED in a screen, it emits some photons. They land in your retina. They activate a receptor. That's it. Those photons, they stop there. They're not going into the brain. whatever their speed, their color, their direction, all of that is gone.

Now all that the brain has is those receptors being activated. And how do they transmit that signal into the brain? They send the neurotransmitter. It's the same neurotransmitter that all the other neurons are using. The only thing that it brings into the pictures, when did it fire? When did eye fire compared to this other receptor in another part of the retina? Everything that we experience, everything that any brain experiences, is recoded into time patterns.

And from those time patterns that our brains calculate everything, our impression of reality, our consciousness, our memories. So let's move on to another huge question. And that's the nature of consciousness. So this is obviously an incredibly difficult question to the extent where most people would just say, well, I don't want to go near that. I'll leave somebody else.

I'll leave that for somebody else to figure out. But it seems to me that your thesis is that's all part of the same process. Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think it's the same illusion that we have of this fundamental distinction between my feelings, my sensations, and the physical reality of the world. You hear people say that no amount of physical evidence would explain the smell of garlic or would explain the cold. or would explain the color red, and that is irresolvable. That's the heart problem of consciousness. You could never possibly solve this color red.

But what does it mean to solve the color red? What does it mean to explain the smell of garlic? To me, what it means is to explain what does this sense consist of. What people are saying is that it doesn't consist of anything. It's irreducible. That's what it is. There's no further division. But there is.

For example, people with genetic variations in their olfactory receptors and what kind of molecule they have in their nose, they would have different associations with the same smell of a particular chemical. There's one chemical, and some people smell it and they say it smells like vanilla, and other people smell it and they say it smells like vomit. And that's predictable based on your genotype, based on your gene. and to each individual person, that's an irreducible feeling. That's this fundamental grain of consciousness. But you drill into it and you find that it consists of multiple signals from these chemical receptors that all combine together and give you this perception that seems as if it's unified and irreducible.

So my sense is that it is unreliable to start with your overall, impression of the world. Our sense of what we are and what this world is is unreliable. It's fragile. It's easy to temper with, with chemicals, with, you know, if you're tired, if you're sleepy, it falls apart so easily that to use that as a starting point for a scientific inquiry, I just think is unreliable. That's why I prefer the bottom-up view where you try to first define what all of these terms mean from first principles. And when you do that, I think this wall just dissolves. Yeah, so going on a sort of step further from that, if I can say that, it seems to me that largely our physical forms haven't

really changed for an awful long time. You know, if we look at early human ancestors, they still look vaguely the same. But can we say that a different type of evolution began at some point? And that's the sort of evolution, I guess I'd say, of ideas themselves. Is that something that you'd agree with? I would say that all evolution is evolution of ideas. Whether it's genetic evolution, that's the evolution of ideas of form, what kind of body works, what are horns good for, what is a fin good for? Those are ideas, nature's ideas, essences, and all biological evolution is an evolution

of those ideas. But there's also cultural evolution. evolution of human ideas. We imitate each other. We imitate each other with variation. And we choose some ideas to imitate at the expense of others that we reject and forget. And those are the same mechanisms that make up genetic evolution.

That's how species evolve. And that's also how languages evolve and music genres evolve and fashion trends evolve and food trends evolve. Food trends are my favorite example of cultural evolution. Me too. I love the fact that there is a single traceable line between a donor kebab in Turkey and shawarma in the Middle East and shavirma in Russian, just a different word,

and Hiros in Greece and tacos alpasteur in Mexico. That to me is just a beautiful example of biological evolution, except on the cultural level, on this level of human ideas. So I think that both of those are the same evolutionary process, just kind of spilling over into different dimensions. And if we're thinking about what is ahead of us in the future, I used to have this children's book that imagined a man of the future. And it was this, for some reason, he was naked. So no more clothes. His ears could shut, which was, I guess, useful.

He had wings and two arms, one with a hammer. a really big buffy arm and one really fine for, you know, pincers and fine-grained movements. That was the idea. So that seems a little unlikely to me. I don't think that we will get to that point. We would have to have really strong selection for flying. A lot of people have to die before we grow those wings. I think more likely, more likely our evolution will proceed in another dimension,

in a dimension of human ideas or maybe technological ideas, I think artificial intelligence will inevitably be a part of that evolution. But it's not unprecedented. It's not like this is the first time that evolution has found a new direction. This example that I like to use is, well, I'm a cell biologist, so I am interested in molecules. And there are some molecules in our cells that are exactly the same, in plants, in single,

cell algae and fungi in our cells. There are these molecules that, for example, detect nutrients. They get activated when we have a lot of nutrients deactivated when we're starving and change how the cell operates. So that same molecule, same device, same machine, it exists in all of these different types of organisms that are really, really far apart from each other. It's the same device, same machine. And pretty much every component, every meaningful component of a cell,

exists in all of these different species. So really our cells are very, very similar. They're very much the same device with slight variations. So what does that mean? It means that this basic cellular design basically stopped evolving. Before there were plants and animals and fungi and algae. Before all of those branches separated, there was a point in time where evolution of the cell would have appeared to us done, installed,

and we would have had the same conversation about what else could we add to a cell? Could we add some ear shutters? Could we add things? I guess we could, but it's probably where it's going to be from now on. And you could envision that, well, this is the end of evolution. There's nothing more to evolve. But what happened was evolution opened up this new dimension, this new space of possibilities through multicellularity, through building more complicated things with many cells,

you could now achieve a whole new level of possibilities and opportunities. And that became the next stage in evolution. So from a perspective of those single-celled creatures, that would have been as alien and as strange and unusual as this transition between genetic evolution and cultural evolution or between natural intelligence and artificial intelligence. Probably shouldn't say transition from natural to artificial. artificial intelligence, that sounds a little ominous, but let's say the incorporation of artificial

intelligence into our biological evolution. So essentially, evolution is a force that just cannot be stopped. Absolutely. Evolution is smarter than you. That's Orgel's second rule. That's this famous principle in biology. Whenever you think that you've understood evolution or you predict what it can do or what it cannot do or where it's going to go or it's not going to go, you are probably wrong.

that proves to be true over and over in evolutionary and this biological work in general. But yeah, you know, evolution really is simply the fact that good ideas survive and bad ideas do not. And why is it that good ideas survive? Because they are good ideas. And why they are bad ideas not survive? Because they are bad ideas. And what is a good idea? It's an idea that survives.

What is a bad idea? It's an idea that doesn't survive. Really, it's all by definition. It cannot not happen. It's built into the very nature of time and causality and the fact that one thing leads to another and nothing lasts forever and most things disappear. And among things that disappear occasionally,

there are some that manage to persevere. That is what evolution really is. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr Nicolay Kokushkin. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, One Hand Clapping, Unravelling the Mystery of the Human Mind. If you liked what you've just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then please do also

check out our YouTube channel, at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist Focal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.

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