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

A leading neuroscientist presents a groundbreaking exploration of how time works inside the mind, arguing that the human brain's complex system constructs our sense of chronological flow in ways that are essential to evolution and everyday survival.
A leading neuroscientist presents a groundbreaking exploration of how time works inside the mind, arguing that the human brain's complex system constructs our sense of chronological flow in ways that are essential to evolution and everyday survival. By the author of Brain Bugs.
A neuroscientist investigates how thearchitecture of the human brain shapes ourunderstanding of the nature of time.
“Time” is the most common noun in the English language, yet philosophers and scientists don’t agree about what time actually is or how to define it. Perhaps this is because the brain—the most complex dynamical system in the known universe—tells, represents, and perceives time in multiple ways.In this virtuosic work of popular science, Dean Buonomano investigates the relationship between the brain and time: What is time? Why does time seem to speed up or slow down? Is our sense that time flows an illusion? In lucid prose, Buonomano presents his own influential theory of how the brain tells time, and he illuminates such concepts as free will, consciousness, spacetime, and relativity from the perspective of a neuroscientist. Drawing on physics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, he reveals that the brain’s ultimate purpose may be to predict the future—and thus that your brain is a time machine.