Touching Them All

TOUCHING THEM ALL is the first book of a trilogy that engages many of life's most intriguing questions, both practical and metaphysical. Charlie Howell is a baseball player of uncommon ability whose perpetually restless mind seeks to "touch all the bases" and embrace a life of inquiry. He is fascinated by the workings and capabilities of the human brain, so as a young student he immerses himself in the discipline of neuroscience, which he uses as his framework to analyze and understand the world he lives in. Of course, no life fully lived escapes the slings and arrows of disappointment and tragedy, and Charlie often struggles to make sense of why life unfolds as it does. Blessed with natural intellectual curiosity, Charlie learns how to combine his knowledge of how the brain functions with a wonderful capacity for absorbing new knowledge and inculcating the wisdom of those he encounters, particularly one Sarah Wilson. As Charlie discovers, however, there are no shortcuts to learning life's harshest and most enduring lessons. The full breadth of human emotion cannot be experienced by reading a book, watching a movie, or even observing another person. Just as consciousness is unique to each of us, so are the color and range of our emotions. Life is never the same for any two people, and only by living through our own unique experiences can we ever hope to know what life is really about. Charlie Howell willingly takes on that journey, and in the process he discovers a simple truth. In a recent interview, Peter Schuller offered some insight into that simple truth and how he came to write the trilogy. "Ever since I was a kid, I have believed that as a species we could do better, that we could make it possible for a lot more people to escape the consuming drudgery of simply trying to survive and allow them to experience the true and complete majesty of what it means to be human. Throughout my early career as a lawyer and investment banker, I was exposed to many different human systems and institutions, but it was not until I became a management consultant that I saw how things really worked within organizations, and what the norms of human behavior actually are. Anyway, as a result of that experience, I decided that I had to understand not only what those normative behaviors were but how and why they emerge, so I formed a "think tank" to study human consciousness. I did end up publishing a White Paper summarizing my three years of research, but in the interim, I became fascinated by several different scientific disciplines, including neuroscience, complexity science, quantum physics, Information Theory, and epigenetics. So, you see, when I first began my career as a lawyer, I never could have foreseen that I would end up studying brain systems, information theory, and quantum mechanics, but here I am and therein lies the great lesson for so many of us I think--the creative path of the universe has its own set of systems dynamics "