Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time - Hardcover

Buonomano, Dean

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393247945 ISBN 13: 9780393247947

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017

Synopsis

A leading neuroscientist embarks on a groundbreaking exploration of how time works inside the brain.

In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, brain researcher and best-selling author Dean Buonomano draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to present his influential theory of how we tell, and perceive, time. The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological flow and enables “mental time travel”―simulations of future and past events. These functions are essential not only to our daily lives but to the evolution of the human race: without the ability to anticipate the future, mankind would never have crafted tools or invented agriculture. The brain was designed to navigate our continuously changing world by predicting what will happen and when.

Buonomano combines neuroscience expertise with a far-ranging, multidisciplinary approach. With engaging style, he illuminates such concepts as consciousness, spacetime, and relativity while addressing profound questions that have long occupied scientists and philosophers alike: What is time? Is our sense of time’s passage an illusion? Does free will exist, or is the future predetermined? In pursuing the answers, Buonomano reveals as much about the fascinating architecture of the human brain as he does about the intricacies of time itself. This virtuosic work of popular science leads to an astonishing realization: your brain is, at its core, a time machine.

22 illustrations

About this title

About the Author

Dean Buonomano is a professor of neurobiology and psychology at UCLA and a leading theorist on the neuroscience of time. His previous book, Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives, was a Wall Street Journal bestseller.

Review

Apparently elastic and possibly illusory, time is a puzzle to physicists and neuroscientists alike. Dean Buonomano straddles the divide, invoking cutting-edge theory and research as he wrestles with theoften glaring mismatch between physical and 'felt' time. The result is immensely engaging.
Nature

Buonomano lays out a wealth of complex concepts in an entertaining,digestible way. He admits that both physics and neuroscience are stillfar from understanding the true nature of time, but his book will makeyou question your own perceptions and marvel at the fact that your brain is probably "the best time machine you will ever own".
Diana Kwon, Scientific American Mind

Your Brain Is a Time Machine can be disquieting, as the implications settle in, for example, of inhabiting a universe in which all moments exist. But the book ultimately leads to an internal quieting, as one realises that all the profound scientific discoveries of the past century or so are struggling with a common enemy: time.
Anil Ananthaswamy, New Scientist

Mr. Buonomano sets out boldly to accomplish what Saint Augustine did not dare--to explain time in its infinite varieties.
Carol Tavris, Wall Street Journal

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0393247945
• ISBN 13: 9780393247947
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304