What can we truly learn about the brain from a kidney cell? And what do aliens and alien-like LLMs have to teach us? And if language is our escape velocity moment, what does that mean for the future of AI? Nikolai Kokushkin is a scientist who believes that memory, intelligence, and even the roots of awareness may exist in places we never thought to look. In the timing of molecules, in the learning of single cells, in the slow abstractions of evolution. He takes us through all of this in this wonderful new book, One Hand Clapping. Now let's go into the impossible. Welcome to UC San Diego. So nice of you to come down and visit us.

Thanks, Brian. It's much sunnier here than it is in New York, so I'm happy to be here.

That is amazing. You're here for a big neuroscience conference, right? What's the name of the conference?

Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting.

Okay, great.

But I'm also going to this Molecular and Cellular Cognition Society meeting today, which is a little bit closer to what I do because it's more about molecules.

And cells, molecules and biology. We'll talk about all of that. We'll talk about your wonderful newish book. I call it newish because it was released 5 years ago, but only in Russian. To my Russian-speaking friends, welcome, privet to everyone out there. And it talks a lot about some of the most majestic, mysterious, mesmerizing things in the known universe, including the universe itself, taking us on a journey from the origin of the universe to the origin of language and the possible deep future. We're going to get into all that today. And also later on, we're going to judge the book by its cover as I emso want to do.

But I want to start off with your work with sea slugs. And I don't mean, you know, kind of the administrators that you see— sorry. And I don't mean the administrators at NYU. I know one of them, Greg Gavidadze, one of my best friends and mentors, uh, just a wonderful person. But tell me, what are sea slugs? What can they tell us possibly about advanced language-bearing capabilities that we humans like to claim superiority for?

Well, You know, our intuition is that a research model like a mouse, that's what most neuroscientists study. The intuition is that it's somewhere halfway between us and bacteria and that it's such a simple animal that, that it's easy to work with and it represents just the general sense of what an animal is. But really, a mouse is almost a human. A mouse is a really complicated, very special, very unusual animal. There are very few animals that actually live on land, very few mammals that live on land. Actually, by the standard of most animal kingdom, that mouse is giant. It's warm-blooded. It's ramped up to this maximum of biochemical capability.

And that's just like us humans. Sea slugs are a much more normal animal. It's an animal that really represents what it means to be an animal, what it means to have a nervous system, a brain. What does that mean? If you remove ourselves, humans, from the picture. And that's what I am interested in. I want to understand what these processes, these mental processes like abstract thinking, what do they mean from the perspective of nature as a whole, not just us humans, but all of nature. And sea slugs are perfect for that because they tell us how you can form an abstract idea in the most minimal form, how you can form a memory in the most minimal form using only a few components that we also use. But we use them on the scale of billions and trillions where it's almost impossible to understand everything.

But in a sea slug, you can get really to the bottom of what this abstract thought or memory is from the perspective of a cell or a molecule. There's a shorter path from the molecular to the real life of this animal in the wild. You can understand the entire sequence and that is powerful. I think it's a much better starting point. For understanding the mind than a mouse.

What do they think about? What do they remember? Do they dream? Tell me about— they look like aliens. I mean, we'll put in some pictures of these wonderful creatures here, but you know, what do they think about? You know, when I was a little blastocyst growing up on the coral reef where my mom and dad met, or what can they possibly remember?

You know, it's very difficult to think of such things. It's almost, it's almost like, how can you imagine a color that you've never seen? Or a color that you will never be able to see. How— you can't even think about that. You know that it's possible. You know that there are animals that see vastly more colors than we do, millions of times more colors than we do. But it's impossible to imagine. And in the same exact way, it's impossible to imagine what another creature like a sea slug thinks like. And that's really a fundamental difference.

That's the tricky part about a mouse. Because a mouse is so close to us that when we see a mouse moving around or freezing or stopping, we can sort of make that inference that, oh, it must be scared or it must be remembering this or it must be having a thought about that piece of cheese that we gave it. And that's going to be reasonable because there are the same brain parts in that animal that we have.