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Breaking away from the models most commonly used today in neuroscience and philosophy of mind, Giorgio Vallortigara, professor of Neuroscience and Animal Cognition at the University of Trento, advances the original thesis that the basic forms of cognitive activity do not require large brains, and that the neurological surplus observed in some animals, including humans, serves memory stores and not thought processes or consciousness. The most plausible substrate for the emergence of the latter should rather be sought in an essential characteristic of cells, the ability to feel. A capacity that would have manifested itself for the first time when, with the acquisition of voluntary movement, elementary organisms felt the need to distinguish between the stimulation produced by their own activity and that procured by the external world, the other from themselves. The existence of a lowest common denominator between us and the humblest forms of life distances us once again from the Cartesian concept of the animal-machine – and raises ethical questions that we will no longer be able to avoid.