From Mitochondria to Minds: The Illustrated Science of the Psychedelic Dream Called Life

Like consciousness, like music, like love, life itself didn’t have to exist — nothing in the fundamental laws demands it. The universe could have gone on lapping at itself as a horizonless sea of pure spacetime, black and lifeless as the inside of a skull. But, in a whisper that soon became a symphony, life arose to give us such ceaseless wonders as the ghost pipe and the ginkgo, the bowerbird and the eye of the scallop. Neuroscientist Brian Isett and artist Claudia Biçen celebrate the wonder of how we went from mitochondria to minds in The Silent Teachers: How… read article