Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe Read Online Free PDF

into the nerve cell of a caterpillar (although I didn’t know it at the time, the “doctor” was actually a graduate student, Josh Sanes, who is now a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University). Beside him, a small centrifuge loaded with samples was going round and round. My friend whispered something over the doctor’s shoulder. The whining sound of the motor drowned out what he said. The doctor smiled at me with a curious gentle glance.
    “I’ll stop back later,” my newfound friend said.
    From that moment on, everything was a dream come true. The doctor and I talked all afternoon. And then I looked at the clock. “Oh, no!” I said. “It’s late. I must go!”

    I hurried home and went straight to my treehouse. That evening, the call of my mother penetrated the woods, sounding like the whistle of a locomotive: “Rob—by! Time for dinner!”
    No one had any idea that evening—including me—that I had met one of the greatest scientists in the world. In the 1950s, Kuffler had perfected an idea that combined several medical disciplines, fusing elements of physiology, biochemistry, histology, anatomy, and electron microscopy into a single group. His new name for the field: “Neurobiology.”
    Harvard’s Department of Neurobiology was created in 1966 with Kuffler as its chairman. As a medical student, I eventually ended up using his From Neurons to Brain as a textbook.
    I could not have predicted it, but in the months ahead Dr. Kuffler would help me enter the world of science. I returned many times, chatting with the scientists in his lab as they probed the neurons of caterpillars. In fact, I recently came across a letter Josh Sanes sent to the Jackson Laboratories at the time: “If you check your records, you will find that Bob ordered four mice from the laboratories a few months ago. That bankrupted him for a month. At present, he is faced with a choice between going to his prom or buying a few dozen more eggs.” Although I ultimately decided to go to the prom, I became so intrigued by the importance of the “sensorymotor system”—of consciousness and animal sense perception—that I went back to Harvard to work with the famed psychologist B.F. Skinner several years later.
    Oh, and by the way, I won the science fair with my chicken project. And the principal had to congratulate my mother in front of the whole school.
    Like Emerson and Thoreau—two of the greatest American Transcendentalists—my youth was spent exploring the forested woods of Massachusetts, which teemed with life. More important, I found that for each life, there was a universe, its own universe. Witnessing my fellow creatures, I began to see that each appeared to generate a sphere of existence, and realized that our perceptions may be unique but perhaps not special.

    One of my earliest memories of boyhood was venturing beyond the mown boundary of our backyard into the wild, overgrown region bordering the woods. Today, the world’s population is twice what it was then, but even now many kids undoubtedly still know where the known world ends and the wild, slightly spooky and dangerous, untamed universe begins. One day, after crossing that boundary from the orderly to the feral, and after working my way through the thickets, I came to an old, gnarled apple tree smothered in vines. I squeezed my way into the hidden clearing underneath it. It seemed wonderful, on the one hand, that I had discovered a place that no other human being knew existed; on the other hand, I was confused about how such a place could exist if I hadn’t discovered it. I was raised as a Catholic, so I thought I had found a special place on God’s stage—and from some celestial vantage point, I was being scrutinized and watched by the Supreme Creator, perhaps almost as narrowly as I, as a medical student with a microscope, would one day scrutinize the tiny creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop