What’s bread got to do with memories?

The periodic table sorts 118 elements into rows and columns. Two dozen of these are manmade, the rest are building blocks of everything across the universe.

Similarly, amino acids are the building blocks of life. All living things – from a virus to a blue whale – are assembled from just 20 of these. Dive into a cell, and the nucleotides or building blocks of DNA – A, T, C, G – are also identical across plants and animals.

The ancients had grasped this unity via philosophical reasoning. The Gita, for instance, urges you to see “one undivided imperishable reality within all diverse living beings”.

Nikolay Kukushkin, neuroscientist and self-described “molecular philosopher”, discusses this unity with scientific rigour in his book One Hand Clapping: Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind.

Kukushkin studies “the miracle by which molecules form memories”, and the book’s title references a Zen ‘koan’ or riddle: “If two hands come together and make a sound, what is the sound of one hand clapping?” From a Zen perspective, there is only one hand. Duality arises from the idea of observer and observed.

By extension, Kukushkin says, “The boundary between human and the rest of the world is not real.” As for the notion that humans are the acme of evolution – perfection – it is deeply flawed. There are many special things – like photosynthesis – that we can’t do. And whatever exceptional qualities we have are a result of the properties and “essences” of nature that developed before us.

At the molecular level, life could not have existed without carbon’s unique tendency to form multiple strong bonds with other atoms. In the living world, where would we be without proteins – long chains of amino acids – that do everything but replicate themselves? Even our memories are formed through their action, Kukushkin says.

Our journey from single-celled organisms can be summed up as the story of natural selection. But what is it? A randomness that chooses long necks for giraffes and hard shells for coconuts? Kukushkin says, “Selection is built into the logic of the universe.” Instead of “God” designing every single living being, here’s nature laying down what will or won’t work under certain conditions.

At the cellular level, nature follows rules set billions of years ago. When nutrients are abundant, a protein called mTOR turns on to promote cell growth; when they are depleted, a protein called AMPK turns off cell growth. This is true across the board, from fungi to humans.

There’s another protein called MAPK that yeast uses to adapt to a salty environment, and humans to form memories.

And talking of memories, our minds are so complex, we can get lost in our own maze. We are prone to subjectivity, bias, and confusion between reality and imagination. “Our brains…are not even trying to determine what the world really is,” Kukushkin says.

Rather, they are always trying to “align reality with expectation”. Remember “The Dress” from 2015? Some saw it as blue-and-black, and others as white-and-gold, depending on whether they thought it was shot in natural light or artificial light.

And now our biases and expectations are colouring AI, not because we want them to, but because of the properties of carbon, amino acids, etc that have shaped us. We are, after all, the sound of one hand clapping.