From one of the world's preeminent neuroscientists: a landmark reflection that spans the biological and social sciences, offering a new way of understanding the origins of life, feeling and culture.

'This disturbing book shakes our conceptions of the mechanisms behind life, mind and culture. The author brings them together in a single perspective centered on homeostasis ... It is incredibly, formidably, refreshing ... A strange and ambitious book, which draws on multiple disciplines and moves across time and space to give us, very simply, a new definition of life' Revue Medicale Suisse