The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

by V.S. Ramachandran

But in biological systems there is a deep unity between structure, function, and origin. You cannot make very much progress understanding any one of these unless you are also paying close attention to the other two.

Homogeneity breeds weakness: theoretical blind spots, stale paradigms, an echo-chamber mentality, and cults of personality.

Humans are apes. So too we are mammals. We are vertebrates. We are pulpy, throbbing colonies of tens of trillions of cells. We are all of these things, but we are not “merely” these things. And we are, in addition to all these things, something unique, something unprecedented, something transcendent. We are something truly new under the sun, with uncharted and perhaps limitless potential. We are the first and only species whose fate has rested in its own hands, and not just in the hands of chemistry and instinct.

With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, is the greatest mystery of all.