Slugs Have Memories. Nikolay Kukushkin - #539
Into the Impossible With Brian Keating
Brian Keating
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2026
⏱️ 78 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | What can we truly learn about the brain from a kidney cell? |
| 0:02.8 | And what do aliens and alien-like LLMs have to teach us? |
| 0:06.2 | And if language is our escape velocity moment, |
| 0:08.2 | what does that mean for the future of AI? |
| 0:10.2 | Nikolai Kukushkin is a scientist who believes that memory, |
| 0:13.4 | intelligence, and even the roots of awareness may exist in places we never thought to look. |
| 0:17.8 | 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. 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's more about molecules and cells. Molecules and biology. We'll talk about all of that. |
| 0:54.3 | We'll talk about your wonderful newish book. |
| 0:57.2 | I call it newish because it was released five years ago, but only in Russian to my Russian-speaking |
| 1:01.8 | friends, you know, welcome prebiate to everyone out there. |
| 1:05.3 | And it talks a lot about some of the most majestic, mysterious, mesmerizing things in the known universe, including |
| 1:12.3 | the universe itself, taking us on a journey from the origin of the universe to the origin |
| 1:17.3 | of language and the possible deep future. |
| 1:19.7 | We're going to get into all that today. |
| 1:21.6 | And also later on, we're going to judge the book by its cover as I am so want to do. |
| 1:27.0 | But I want to start off with your work with C-slugs. And I don't mean, you know, kind of the administrators at you see. Sorry. And I don't mean the administrators at NYU. I know one of them, Greg Gabadadadze, one of my best friends and mentors. That's just a wonderful person. But tell me, what are C-slegged? What can they tell us possibly |
| 1:44.5 | about advanced language-bearing capabilities that we humans like to claim superiority for? |
| 1:50.0 | Well, you know, our intuition is that a research model like a mouse, that's what most |
| 1:56.8 | neuroscientists study, the intuition is that it's somewhere halfway between us and bacteria, and that it's such a simple animal that it's easy to work with, and it represents |
| 2:07.0 | just the general sense of what an animal is. |
| 2:10.7 | But really, a mouse is almost a human. |
| 2:13.4 | A mouse is really complicated, a very special, very unusual animal. |
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