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Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time
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.
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.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published May 19, 2017
554 people are currently reading
7892 people want to read
About the author
Dean Buonomano
5books88followersDean Buonomano is a professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Psychology and the Brain Research Institute at UCLA. He lives in Los Angeles.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 210 reviews
May 9, 2017
I feel obliged to admit that, like the author, I am a scientist working on the neuroscience of timing. There are not many non-fiction books about time, behavior and neuroscience and therefore I simply had to read this book. And I am glad I did.
The book begins with a summary of the psychology, philosophy, pharmacology and physiology of time. The author has an excellent grasp of the issues at stake and the importance of doing research on these topics. How do humans measure short and long time intervals? What is the shortest time interval that we can detect? How does our body know when to go to bed and get up again, and how accurate is this circadian clock? How do drugs affect our time perception, and what does that tell us about the brain? How can neurons or neural networks detect measure time? I don’t agree with everything he says about the neuroscience of timing. However, it was a joy to read these chapters and, on their own, these six chapters justified the time and money spent on this book. During my own studies, I have read tons of studies on timing employing a broad spectrum of different techniques. This book helped me connect the dots and get a bird eyes view which is something that can get lost in science.
The book sidetracked a bit in chapter seven where Buonomano takes on the physics of time and the philosophical implications. Does time even exist, or is it (like many other things), a persuasive illusion that the brain construes to give us an advantage in evolution? Is presentism (only the ‘now� exists) or eternalism (time is another dimension and ‘now� is to time what ‘here� is to space) the correct model of the universe? What does our subjective sense of time tell us about time itself? These more philosophically oriented questions are taken on, at depth, and Buonomano even gets into the ‘shooting particles in moving trains� thought experiments to explain the implications of Einstein's theory of relativity. I, perhaps naively, did not expect to encounter so much of Einstein in this book, but in the author's defense, he does an excellent job of explaining the implications of relativity, and he even manages to link it back to the psychology and neuroscience of timing.
In the last chapter, the author returns to the core issues. He discusses whether animals plan for the future (they clearly do) and whether they reflect on the future in the same way that we do (debatable). We also get to meet the Pirahã tribe who, according to an anthropologist/missionary who lived with them, lives in the here and now. They were, for instance, quite unimpressed with Christianity when they realized that their visitor had never actually met Jesus. In the last chapter, the author also takes on free will. If time is just another dimension that we can, at least in theory, travel across, then that should logically mean that everything that is going to happen has already happened which presumably means there is no free will. Free will, the author suggests may only be the feeling associated with making decisions - just like we feel pain when we get painful stimulation.
All in all, if you are interested in time and its relation to human behavior - then this book is the book is for you.
The book begins with a summary of the psychology, philosophy, pharmacology and physiology of time. The author has an excellent grasp of the issues at stake and the importance of doing research on these topics. How do humans measure short and long time intervals? What is the shortest time interval that we can detect? How does our body know when to go to bed and get up again, and how accurate is this circadian clock? How do drugs affect our time perception, and what does that tell us about the brain? How can neurons or neural networks detect measure time? I don’t agree with everything he says about the neuroscience of timing. However, it was a joy to read these chapters and, on their own, these six chapters justified the time and money spent on this book. During my own studies, I have read tons of studies on timing employing a broad spectrum of different techniques. This book helped me connect the dots and get a bird eyes view which is something that can get lost in science.
The book sidetracked a bit in chapter seven where Buonomano takes on the physics of time and the philosophical implications. Does time even exist, or is it (like many other things), a persuasive illusion that the brain construes to give us an advantage in evolution? Is presentism (only the ‘now� exists) or eternalism (time is another dimension and ‘now� is to time what ‘here� is to space) the correct model of the universe? What does our subjective sense of time tell us about time itself? These more philosophically oriented questions are taken on, at depth, and Buonomano even gets into the ‘shooting particles in moving trains� thought experiments to explain the implications of Einstein's theory of relativity. I, perhaps naively, did not expect to encounter so much of Einstein in this book, but in the author's defense, he does an excellent job of explaining the implications of relativity, and he even manages to link it back to the psychology and neuroscience of timing.
In the last chapter, the author returns to the core issues. He discusses whether animals plan for the future (they clearly do) and whether they reflect on the future in the same way that we do (debatable). We also get to meet the Pirahã tribe who, according to an anthropologist/missionary who lived with them, lives in the here and now. They were, for instance, quite unimpressed with Christianity when they realized that their visitor had never actually met Jesus. In the last chapter, the author also takes on free will. If time is just another dimension that we can, at least in theory, travel across, then that should logically mean that everything that is going to happen has already happened which presumably means there is no free will. Free will, the author suggests may only be the feeling associated with making decisions - just like we feel pain when we get painful stimulation.
All in all, if you are interested in time and its relation to human behavior - then this book is the book is for you.
January 14, 2018
One of the more comforting things I find about the universe is that scientifically speaking, death doesn't exist. This is something which we don't discuss much because science and religion are sometimes at war with one another (with the exception of some versions of Buddhism and Hinduism).
Einstein pointed out to the widow of a close friend that while it appeared she lost his husband, he existed alive and well in the past and would eternally. He was no more dead than simply being in a different spot in physics due to the model of universal block time. I.e. the universe is a big block of cement we're just a line moving through. My father, grandfather, and brother are all alive in the "next room" so to speak and when I'm dead--my relatives will be alive themselves.
For those more familiar with comic books, Alan Moore created the character of Doctor Manhatten who experienced time simultaneously. Which is, according to the way physics exists, is probably how things SHOULD be experienced and might be how any aliens we encounter will experience time. A more religious answer is the fact God would experience it this way or a theoretical panpsychic entity consisting of the universe (which is not scientifically impossible). All this sounds like rubbish but so did the concept of a meteorite before people found out rocks really were in the sky.
Dean Buonomano talks about time and the concept of evolution with a very interesting idea: that basically "time" as we perceive it is an evolutionary advantage. Physically, time is just moving from one position to another but the concept of beginnings, middles, and ends are the result of our body being designed to make it easier to predict consequences so we can avoid them. In short, as the Hindu would say, time is an illusion.
There's some definite problems with Dean's portrayal of the subject with the idea of our minds as "mental time machines" running into some issues with quantum physics. While block time is probably 99% true, the 1% is niggling and the nature of quantum physics may mean that its actual complete nonsense (and we're not a line moving through a block of cement but a drop of water moving through an infinite ocean of equally identical drops of water--which might make the oddity of the way we evolved even more so).
Part of the big issue of this book is the untestability of the hypothesis as while it certainly sounds right, the simple fact is we don't understand quantum physics OR consciousness with any real degree of certainty (so much so the only person who has put forth any real solution to it is Roger Penrose and he's something of the Alan Moore of physics in terms of being both amazing as well as a little crazy). So this comes off as a bit more like a philosophical treatise than a hard look at how our perception of reality functions.
It's a good theory, though.
Einstein pointed out to the widow of a close friend that while it appeared she lost his husband, he existed alive and well in the past and would eternally. He was no more dead than simply being in a different spot in physics due to the model of universal block time. I.e. the universe is a big block of cement we're just a line moving through. My father, grandfather, and brother are all alive in the "next room" so to speak and when I'm dead--my relatives will be alive themselves.
For those more familiar with comic books, Alan Moore created the character of Doctor Manhatten who experienced time simultaneously. Which is, according to the way physics exists, is probably how things SHOULD be experienced and might be how any aliens we encounter will experience time. A more religious answer is the fact God would experience it this way or a theoretical panpsychic entity consisting of the universe (which is not scientifically impossible). All this sounds like rubbish but so did the concept of a meteorite before people found out rocks really were in the sky.
Dean Buonomano talks about time and the concept of evolution with a very interesting idea: that basically "time" as we perceive it is an evolutionary advantage. Physically, time is just moving from one position to another but the concept of beginnings, middles, and ends are the result of our body being designed to make it easier to predict consequences so we can avoid them. In short, as the Hindu would say, time is an illusion.
There's some definite problems with Dean's portrayal of the subject with the idea of our minds as "mental time machines" running into some issues with quantum physics. While block time is probably 99% true, the 1% is niggling and the nature of quantum physics may mean that its actual complete nonsense (and we're not a line moving through a block of cement but a drop of water moving through an infinite ocean of equally identical drops of water--which might make the oddity of the way we evolved even more so).
Part of the big issue of this book is the untestability of the hypothesis as while it certainly sounds right, the simple fact is we don't understand quantum physics OR consciousness with any real degree of certainty (so much so the only person who has put forth any real solution to it is Roger Penrose and he's something of the Alan Moore of physics in terms of being both amazing as well as a little crazy). So this comes off as a bit more like a philosophical treatise than a hard look at how our perception of reality functions.
It's a good theory, though.
January 23, 2019
An average book, which ended up being a bit of a chore to get through.
This book seems to be trying pretty earnestly to be a comprehensive look at time, but ends up being what feels like a large collection of loosely tied together anecdotes about time. Each section has almost enough cited info to form an intro university course's syllabus, but none of them quite reach it, and the book feels shallow as a result.
Buonomano explores a lot of different fields. Philosophy, eternalism vs presentism, free will, timeless physics, relativity, developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology, time perception, the list goes on and on and on, all topics of which full books could themselves be written about. Most of the interesting and useful information is in the first half of the book, with the second half mostly being about the nature of time in general rather than time as it pertains to humans. Where this book shines is that the citations don't suffer along with the breadth - everything is well researched, and any layperson question you might have about time probably has a citation in this book with an answer.
Overall a pretty normal nonfiction book that broadly speaks about a big topic.
This book seems to be trying pretty earnestly to be a comprehensive look at time, but ends up being what feels like a large collection of loosely tied together anecdotes about time. Each section has almost enough cited info to form an intro university course's syllabus, but none of them quite reach it, and the book feels shallow as a result.
Buonomano explores a lot of different fields. Philosophy, eternalism vs presentism, free will, timeless physics, relativity, developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology, time perception, the list goes on and on and on, all topics of which full books could themselves be written about. Most of the interesting and useful information is in the first half of the book, with the second half mostly being about the nature of time in general rather than time as it pertains to humans. Where this book shines is that the citations don't suffer along with the breadth - everything is well researched, and any layperson question you might have about time probably has a citation in this book with an answer.
Overall a pretty normal nonfiction book that broadly speaks about a big topic.
June 19, 2021
Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time is an eye-opening book. It is a combination of neuroscience and physics on the topic of time, completed with charts and diagrams. Some parts may appear very academic, but the writing is clear and precise without too many jargons.
Your brain is a time machine because, as the author explains, it does the following: 1. remembers the past in order to predict the future; 2. tells time; 3. creates the sense of time; 4. allows us to mentally travel back and forth in time.
The brain has several inner clocks, each works on different time scale and solves a different problem that requires time. The brain's circadian clock tells time like an hourglass instead of a pendulum clock. Time compression and dilation - why you feel things moving in slow motion when you are hit by a car, why time passes faster when you are engaged in an absorbing task and slower when you are bored, and why drugs (such as marijuana) can distort your sense of time. It is not surprising how inaccurate and unreliable our judgments of elapsed time are. How the brain works as a time machine is closely related to how memory works. Patients with damaged hippocampus who can not form new long term memory may also fail to imagine a future event.
Two views of the nature of time: presentism and eternalism. Neuroscience is presentism by default. The second half of the book explores why modern physicists generally favor eternalism. The author has an excellent explanation of why "now" is a perspective to time like "here" is to space, easy to understand to a layman like me.
"Among the many things the brain certainly did not evolve to understand was the brain itself. Another is the nature of time."
The second last chapter discusses deeper questions of the brain and time. Our brain evolved to tell time, to run future scenarios in our brain. This ability sets homo sapiens apart from fellow animals. The idea of after-life was probably invented to deal with our own eventual death. However, the evolution baggage also makes us naturally favor short-term gratification over long-term gains. This temporal myopia is hard to overcome. No surprise why people find it so hard to accept responsibility for climate change, not to mention making an effort to stop it.
"Mental time travel is both a gift and a curse." It turns out "live in the present" is hard, and, on the other hand, is to live in the present the same thing as to abandon the ability to vision the future?
The last chapter, Consciousness: Blinding the Past and the Future, discusses the nature of consciousness, free will and life itself.
Your brain is a time machine because, as the author explains, it does the following: 1. remembers the past in order to predict the future; 2. tells time; 3. creates the sense of time; 4. allows us to mentally travel back and forth in time.
The brain has several inner clocks, each works on different time scale and solves a different problem that requires time. The brain's circadian clock tells time like an hourglass instead of a pendulum clock. Time compression and dilation - why you feel things moving in slow motion when you are hit by a car, why time passes faster when you are engaged in an absorbing task and slower when you are bored, and why drugs (such as marijuana) can distort your sense of time. It is not surprising how inaccurate and unreliable our judgments of elapsed time are. How the brain works as a time machine is closely related to how memory works. Patients with damaged hippocampus who can not form new long term memory may also fail to imagine a future event.
Two views of the nature of time: presentism and eternalism. Neuroscience is presentism by default. The second half of the book explores why modern physicists generally favor eternalism. The author has an excellent explanation of why "now" is a perspective to time like "here" is to space, easy to understand to a layman like me.
"Among the many things the brain certainly did not evolve to understand was the brain itself. Another is the nature of time."
The second last chapter discusses deeper questions of the brain and time. Our brain evolved to tell time, to run future scenarios in our brain. This ability sets homo sapiens apart from fellow animals. The idea of after-life was probably invented to deal with our own eventual death. However, the evolution baggage also makes us naturally favor short-term gratification over long-term gains. This temporal myopia is hard to overcome. No surprise why people find it so hard to accept responsibility for climate change, not to mention making an effort to stop it.
"Mental time travel is both a gift and a curse." It turns out "live in the present" is hard, and, on the other hand, is to live in the present the same thing as to abandon the ability to vision the future?
The last chapter, Consciousness: Blinding the Past and the Future, discusses the nature of consciousness, free will and life itself.
June 22, 2021
I can’t say this book is a bad one, by contrast it’s well written, readable and informative book about neuroscience and physics of time but in a superficial sense!
My rating is subjective, this book just failed to fulfil my desire to understand underlying nature of time beyond common sense and hence it got 2 stars only!
My rating is subjective, this book just failed to fulfil my desire to understand underlying nature of time beyond common sense and hence it got 2 stars only!
May 2, 2022
Having a budding interest in the intersection of physics and psychology, I picked up this book and it surely didn't disappoint.
"Time" is one of the most complex and tantalizing concepts out there, and hence various views are illustrated (like presentism and eternalism). The idea of natural vs subjective time, a bit of neurobiology of time, conceptualization of time, the space-time fusion from a cognitive perspective, are some of the key themes explored in the book.
The flow of time (or just perceived as such) and how neuroscience and physics diverge here with the subjective feeling of time passage, was my favourite part of the book and gave a lot more food for thought, for further exploration.
"Time" is one of the most complex and tantalizing concepts out there, and hence various views are illustrated (like presentism and eternalism). The idea of natural vs subjective time, a bit of neurobiology of time, conceptualization of time, the space-time fusion from a cognitive perspective, are some of the key themes explored in the book.
The flow of time (or just perceived as such) and how neuroscience and physics diverge here with the subjective feeling of time passage, was my favourite part of the book and gave a lot more food for thought, for further exploration.
July 28, 2021
Quite interesting and well written, and without distractions of autobiographical side stories. The neuroscience was mostly new to me and I am duly impressed. The brain does not keep a synchronizing clock, as computers do but rather a lot of local scenarios where time is linked to actions that need to be performed at certain stages.
While neuroscience seems to support a presentist model of time, where only the present is real and the future open, this conflicts with modern physics that favors an eternalist viewpoint where space-time is fixed and encompasses past, present and future. It is possible therefore that our intuitive notion of time flowing is but an artificial construct of the brain, with the help of an immense storage of the past. I found the explanation of the physics, in particular special relatively both very clear and succinct.
Finally, the distinction between brain and consciousness is rather interesting in that the brain seems to prepare a story, a kind of management summary, for consciousness to consider. This implies some delay between sensory input and conscious awareness, illustrated by the well known experiments showing that the brain makes and executes decisions before consciousness is aware of the situation.
All in all, a very worthwhile reading experience.
While neuroscience seems to support a presentist model of time, where only the present is real and the future open, this conflicts with modern physics that favors an eternalist viewpoint where space-time is fixed and encompasses past, present and future. It is possible therefore that our intuitive notion of time flowing is but an artificial construct of the brain, with the help of an immense storage of the past. I found the explanation of the physics, in particular special relatively both very clear and succinct.
Finally, the distinction between brain and consciousness is rather interesting in that the brain seems to prepare a story, a kind of management summary, for consciousness to consider. This implies some delay between sensory input and conscious awareness, illustrated by the well known experiments showing that the brain makes and executes decisions before consciousness is aware of the situation.
All in all, a very worthwhile reading experience.
May 28, 2017
This is a fantastic introduction to the relationship of our modern concepts of time to the very fine detail we have as to the workings of the brain. Dean Buonomano very clearly spells out what he means by calling the brain a time machine:
1) The brain is a machine that remembers the past in order to predict the future.
2) The brain is a machine that tells time.
3) The brain is a machine that creates the sense of time.
4) The brain allows us to mentally travel back and forth in time.
There are no woo-woo, non-scientific notions of the supernatural, consciousness, time-travel; everything presented here is done so in light of the latest in neuroscience and presented in very clear language. Of particular interest is the concluding chapter which brings in the concept of free will but for whatever reason the author seems to abruptly stop the work there when it appeared there likely could have been another 50 or so pages of material. A wonderful introduction free of the BS that frequently pervades discussion of these topics.
1) The brain is a machine that remembers the past in order to predict the future.
2) The brain is a machine that tells time.
3) The brain is a machine that creates the sense of time.
4) The brain allows us to mentally travel back and forth in time.
There are no woo-woo, non-scientific notions of the supernatural, consciousness, time-travel; everything presented here is done so in light of the latest in neuroscience and presented in very clear language. Of particular interest is the concluding chapter which brings in the concept of free will but for whatever reason the author seems to abruptly stop the work there when it appeared there likely could have been another 50 or so pages of material. A wonderful introduction free of the BS that frequently pervades discussion of these topics.
July 17, 2017
Excellent where the author sticks to his guns: neuroscience and psychology. But the excursions into physics and philosophy are shallow at times and not always correct. Ultimately, the book doesn't deliver on its goal to create a unified view of the perception of time. It could have been a much better book if the author focussed on neuroscience. Despite this worthwhile reading.
July 30, 2020
The neuroscience part of the book is informative, explaining how our brain perceives time. The physics part is less impressive. I could not avoid remembering Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time, which deals with the physics and philosophy of time, and is incredibly poetic.
February 9, 2025
«اگر بخواهیم کار مغز را تنها در دو کلمه خلاصه کنیم، آن دو کلمه این است: پیش بینی آینده»
پ.ن: سوادم تو زمینه زمان قد نمیده و هرکاری کردم نتونستم ریویوی مرتبی درباره اش بنویسم.
امیدوارم بار بعدی که میخون� ذهنم منسجمت� بشه و بتونم این ریویو رو کامل کنم.
پ.ن: سوادم تو زمینه زمان قد نمیده و هرکاری کردم نتونستم ریویوی مرتبی درباره اش بنویسم.
امیدوارم بار بعدی که میخون� ذهنم منسجمت� بشه و بتونم این ریویو رو کامل کنم.
February 13, 2023
This book is mostly a hodgepodge of all too familiar assertions about the nexus between time and consciousness.
Overall, nothing particularly wrong with this book, but just as easily said nothing particularly new within this book except for the author’s experiments from his own lab as he reports them and their significance.
The author never mentioned Henri Bergson while talking about perceived time, and the author seemed to think Stephen Pinker had a lot of smart things to say such as quoting Descartes� cogito ‘I think, therefore I am�, beware of quoting the cogito without first mentioning that Descartes assumes away the world to get at that statement (Heidegger brings the world back), and as a thought experiment ponder how Avicenna’s Floating Man would experience time, or the nature of the self without experiences acquired from our senses. It’s always a pet peeve of mine when someone quotes Descartes and takes him out of context (relation), or doesn’t realize the importance of Henri Bergson and his belief in intuitive time or duration as it relates to understanding time and consciousness. I always recommend the book The Physicist and the Philosopher, or if you are daring the book by Bergson Creative Evolution, Bergson won the Nobel Prize in Literature for a reason.
The author notes David Hume and his reliance on relation, continuity, and cause and effect for understanding, the author should have put the context around the cogito. Hume will say our sympathy (feeling) gives us time or at least understanding but never certainty and Kant (this author never mentioned him) will say that our intuition inherent with us gives us space, time, and cause and effect while returning the universal, necessary and certain by placing the facility of understanding within us not outside of us, or in other words for Kant truth resides within us not outside of us.
Overall, not a bad book, but very little that I haven’t read elsewhere, while at least the author has a narrative that ties the story together and gives a fresh perspective.
Overall, nothing particularly wrong with this book, but just as easily said nothing particularly new within this book except for the author’s experiments from his own lab as he reports them and their significance.
The author never mentioned Henri Bergson while talking about perceived time, and the author seemed to think Stephen Pinker had a lot of smart things to say such as quoting Descartes� cogito ‘I think, therefore I am�, beware of quoting the cogito without first mentioning that Descartes assumes away the world to get at that statement (Heidegger brings the world back), and as a thought experiment ponder how Avicenna’s Floating Man would experience time, or the nature of the self without experiences acquired from our senses. It’s always a pet peeve of mine when someone quotes Descartes and takes him out of context (relation), or doesn’t realize the importance of Henri Bergson and his belief in intuitive time or duration as it relates to understanding time and consciousness. I always recommend the book The Physicist and the Philosopher, or if you are daring the book by Bergson Creative Evolution, Bergson won the Nobel Prize in Literature for a reason.
The author notes David Hume and his reliance on relation, continuity, and cause and effect for understanding, the author should have put the context around the cogito. Hume will say our sympathy (feeling) gives us time or at least understanding but never certainty and Kant (this author never mentioned him) will say that our intuition inherent with us gives us space, time, and cause and effect while returning the universal, necessary and certain by placing the facility of understanding within us not outside of us, or in other words for Kant truth resides within us not outside of us.
Overall, not a bad book, but very little that I haven’t read elsewhere, while at least the author has a narrative that ties the story together and gives a fresh perspective.
March 30, 2025
Tai matyt geriausia, ką iki šiol esu skaitęs apie smegenis. Būtų gerai šią knygą turėti ir lietuvišką.
September 30, 2019
Your Brain is a Time Machine is a fun read and dances on the edge of too much sci in its popsci. I found it a delightful read but I have backgrounds in the fields discussed. It’s both literate and entertaining, and also informative to the novice.
I strongly recommend it to writers/authors needing some neurophysics and chronobiology in their work. There’s enough to make characters sound authoritative without the author dedicating themself to research. It also has one of the best discussions of the philosophy of time I’ve read in quite a while; elegant, instructional, and understandable without being oversimplistic. All in all a good, worthy read.
I strongly recommend it to writers/authors needing some neurophysics and chronobiology in their work. There’s enough to make characters sound authoritative without the author dedicating themself to research. It also has one of the best discussions of the philosophy of time I’ve read in quite a while; elegant, instructional, and understandable without being oversimplistic. All in all a good, worthy read.
May 11, 2020
In his book Your Brain is a Time Machine, the author Dean Buonomano focuses in the physic concept of time. Is time real? And if he exists is it a continuum of sequences with past, present and future, all well-defined and separated, i.e., the presentism concept, or the past, present and future coexists simultaneous, i.e., the eternalism concept. This is the core stone of the book and throughout the text the author makes some remarks about physics in general, about the brain nervous system function and about the implication of both concepts on conscience itself and free will.
The book starts with a monotonous discussion about “brain clocks� and other organic biorhythms, the author stats to emphasize that nothing in physiology of the neuron is appropriated to work as a clock. Assuming that this could be true, the author tries to explain how the brain can “measure� time and in what way he his adapted to performed functions required to “time control�.
In the brain there is no specific area to control time. This control can be observed in several areas of the brain, with the development of local neuronal circuits and complicated systems of stimulation or retro control. But in this discussion the author has an approach that is confuse, not systemized properly. This results in a poor help for the reader. For the first 100 pages the book was uninteresting and boring.
In the second part pf the book (the second part has an introduction about the history of time measurement that was absolutely unnecessary) the author deepens the physical time with an approach on restrict and general relativity and quantic physics. This part of the book is much more objective and clearer for the reader. When I consulted the list of acknowledgments it was obvious why it is so.
Although these ideas are beautifully written, I think that there is lapse about time that I need to emphasize. Being light velocity constant, it´s crystal clear according the relativity laws that time and space must be different in different places of the universe. Our present here may be our past or future in others places of the universe, i.e., in others referential. But here is the busily, these blocks of space are for different referentials and not for the same one. If this is correct, in my referential only the present exists, with the memory of the past and the perspective of a future to come. In a single referential present past and future cant coexist. I think this is true because in a particular referential gravity is maintained. Only with acceleration occurs this is altered.
If laws of physics are constant, when I move at 299.000 km/s (A) light also moves at . So if an observer in another system (B) sees that my beam of light moves at 300.000 km/s, that implies, and according to restrict relativity that the space should be compressed and time distended. But movement is relative and after acceleration and A stabilizes it´s velocity, we could also say that B is moving at 299.000 km/s in relation to A. So it could be said that is the space in A is compressed and time extended? I think not. This only occurs when we have an acceleration of a referential. Only in that case we have changes in time and space.
If this is correct, every time that movement occurs, there is a referential alteration, so in our universe with a huge mosaic of referential we should have different accountabilities for time and space. But for the same referential there should be only one and present should not coexist with past and future. At least that what I think.
Why velocity is related with time enlargement? This is a consequence of the Hendrik Lorentz equation (T(me) = T(you) / �1- (v2/c2)). When our velocity (v2) increases and reaches light velocity (c2) than the T(you) tends to infinite.
According to restrict relativity, A) at a constant velocity laws of physics are constant; B) light velocity is constant independently of its fount of emission; C) with acceleration space is shortened and time elongated.
This is very puzzling for me, and very interesting since it can have implications in the so called “block universe�, i.e., a universe that coexists with time in blocks, with present, past and future coexisting all together.
Independently of being in a universe eternalist or presentism, time flows with a fixed direction. Why with a certain direction? According to second law of thermodynamics (Ludwig Boltzmann) since the “origin� of the universe � the big bang � all the known universe is increasing it’s entropy. And is this increase that gives time a sequence from past to future, from low entropy to higher stats of entropy (biological processes can trick and bypass some of this process, through acquisition of information). All we know will end in the heights level of entropy.
If that is the tendency, why had the universe a start? According to thermodynamics all have emerged from casual fluctuations of the universe that had put the universe in a very improbable state, i.e., one with the lowest entropy possible. Quantic physic has another explanation and according them time flow is a consequence of measurements in a quantic state.
But this is my opinion (the sequence of time has presentism characteristic) and not the author point of view (although I don’t quite understand what he stands for). According the author there are two visions about time (in true, there is a third perspective. As the physicist George Ellis had stated, only the past exists. The present is a wave vibration of the past, and the future is frozen and is yet to come. There is a place for free will!), one Eternalism and another with Presentism. Over its book, Buonomano takes some deductions about the implications of these two perspectives in brain’s time function, free will and accountability for our actions. For presentism, conscience can be real. For the eternalism it should be difficult to explain brain functions namely conscience since it would be difficult to rationalize it in a particular time/space block. Conscience depends on a sequence of frames and cannot be explained in an isolated frame.
Nerveless, eternalism points to a pre-existent future. All scenarios are possible and exists in different blocks. This is hard to accept and collides with our understanding of free-will, that is much more in line with presentism theories. This may be so, but, and it is also demonstrated, that when we take a decision our neuronal activation precedes the conscience of the action that we are going to take. Saying that, our free-will is not so free, and is determined previously to our take of conscience of it. In other words when we decided one action, the decision was already made in our neuronal network, and was taken without our conscience of it.
Another question is about who is moving and flowing through time. Is time flowing or time stands still, and we are moving through time? This could be an interesting scenario since if we are moving in a space/time block universe, we could move forward and backward.
I think that this movement is somehow achieved in dreams when our conscience disconnects of our image and we are dreaming and watching ourselves. If this is so, conscience disengages of our image and enters in another referential where space and time have other meanings.
Discuss time concept and its implication on brain function is the purpose of the book, but It was not accomplished because it lacks a clear master line, and many of the data referred are somehow anecdotal (it’s approach to the subject is an excessive popular science). Examples given by Buonomano to emphasize brains control of time are so loosely presented that I could added others body examples of time machine: heart rate, stomach hungry, bladder function, or the hair growing (one millimeter every 3 days), etc.
When approaching chronobiology, the author says that the major biological rhythms have a cycle of 24 hours, with a tendency for the majority of people to be a bit longer (this is confirmed in several studies cited by the author). According to this data, people will tend to adapt better to progressive shift changes. This may be so for many people but for some Jet leg is more intense when they travel anti-clockwise. This may be because for some people the daily biorhythm is higher than 24 hours when for other is smaller. There are nightingales and owls. This could be better discussed.
Neurons have chronotropic capacity. This was well established by the author when he described experiences with neuron in culture. After incubation with a proper photosensitive gene, it was demonstrated that these neurons in culture could anticipated stimulus producing a protein. So, they have chronotropism ability.
Curious is the reference of brain capacity to control smalls amounts of time through the elaboration of neuronal circuits. The brains have a huge capacity of control smalls amounts of time. As time intervals increase brain loses this accuracy. This is important for the control of language (small times are important in oral language, and author gives several examples), mimicry, Morse code, etc. But rhythms and mimicry presented by some animals (primates and birds) are dependent on the presence of “mirror neurons� described by Giacomo Rizzolatti in 1937 not just neuronal circuits to control time. This must be known by the author.
One other important issue approached by the author is the way we count time. There two ways. One in retrospective: how long as it passed and another one in prospective: how long is this going on. Both counts are not coincident. When an action is boring, prospective time is long, but retrospective is short (children’s in a car travel). When an action is exiting, prospective time is short but retrospective time is long. This is remarkably interesting but does not allow the author to assume that this may be the justification for time stands still in traumatic situation and in their evocation in post-traumatic stress. In post-traumatic stress it is the sensitive memory that works. We may not remember what had happened (point by point), but we recall what we had felt. Therefore, small things like sounds, lights, or pictures can trigger post-traumatic stress events.
According to Einstein, all physical event that can be reproductible can be used in time measurement. In neuronal tissues vibrations and their neurological progressions and depolarization can be used as time device. But I do not believe that brain builds neuronal networks each time that we want to control time. I know if my pen follows into the flor it takes 100 ms and a sheet of paper takes 3 x more. My brain can compare times and do not need to build a neuronal circuit each time that he wants to act like a chronometer.
In the description of time control Buonomano also refers neuroplasticity, neuronal alternance activation, and refractory periods after stimulus as important tools for brain time control. In cerebral function chaos theory are certainly applied. Small variations may have huge differences in the outcome.
There is enough evidence that our interactions with reality starts with a relation with space (this had been demonstrated in children) and time perception is secondary to space perception. This may be true but does not justified the author suggestion that our time reality is block based and present, past and future can coexist simultaneously. But the question: is time a reality or a construct of our mind?, still remains
A construct or not, I think is an illusory question since every biological process has the some direction. The strange case of Benjamin Button is only a picture, and never observed in real live.
So, it seems that time flows. For many psychologists a mental time travel (as the capacity of anticipate the future) is a cognitive capacity of evolved animals. This may be so, but there are many obvious supports that many animals can plan and anticipate the actions of rivals (for food and mates) and predators. But undoubtedly for humans this capacity is loudly higher.
For future planning we must to resort to our memory. Buonomano divides memories in episodic and semantic. Episodic memory is a descriptive one. It is a memory without time. We know that the capital of France is Paris, but we do not know when we had learned that. In the semantic memoir we know facts and recognized when they happened. This kind of memory is located in time. This is probably true, but this is a sensitive memory, and sensitive souvenirs tend to persist longer in our memory. In a traumatic event we may not know exactly what happened but we never forget what we had felt. As I have said, this underlies the post-traumatic events.
Curious is the fact of people with amnesia could not plan the future (fact also experimentally demonstrated). Future planning is also a cultural characteristic. For instance, the Brazilians Indians Pirahãs, do not plan the future more than some days ahead. When the linguist a missionary Daniel Everett had try to catholicize them, they asked if the missionary had known Jesus. As he told them he did not, they don’t show any interest of knowing Jesus. The result was the conversation of the missionary to atheism.
This book addresses time in a physical approach, what results in two concepts: eternalism and presentism. Both concepts have several implications on ethics, moral and physiological issues, and the author discuss these implications and also their consequences on conscience itself. Doing that, and for me one of the major flaws of the book is the author’s approach on conscience without (not one, but several and important) references to António Damásio work. No one can discuss conscience without knowing Damasio theories on the matter.
The book starts with a monotonous discussion about “brain clocks� and other organic biorhythms, the author stats to emphasize that nothing in physiology of the neuron is appropriated to work as a clock. Assuming that this could be true, the author tries to explain how the brain can “measure� time and in what way he his adapted to performed functions required to “time control�.
In the brain there is no specific area to control time. This control can be observed in several areas of the brain, with the development of local neuronal circuits and complicated systems of stimulation or retro control. But in this discussion the author has an approach that is confuse, not systemized properly. This results in a poor help for the reader. For the first 100 pages the book was uninteresting and boring.
In the second part pf the book (the second part has an introduction about the history of time measurement that was absolutely unnecessary) the author deepens the physical time with an approach on restrict and general relativity and quantic physics. This part of the book is much more objective and clearer for the reader. When I consulted the list of acknowledgments it was obvious why it is so.
Although these ideas are beautifully written, I think that there is lapse about time that I need to emphasize. Being light velocity constant, it´s crystal clear according the relativity laws that time and space must be different in different places of the universe. Our present here may be our past or future in others places of the universe, i.e., in others referential. But here is the busily, these blocks of space are for different referentials and not for the same one. If this is correct, in my referential only the present exists, with the memory of the past and the perspective of a future to come. In a single referential present past and future cant coexist. I think this is true because in a particular referential gravity is maintained. Only with acceleration occurs this is altered.
If laws of physics are constant, when I move at 299.000 km/s (A) light also moves at . So if an observer in another system (B) sees that my beam of light moves at 300.000 km/s, that implies, and according to restrict relativity that the space should be compressed and time distended. But movement is relative and after acceleration and A stabilizes it´s velocity, we could also say that B is moving at 299.000 km/s in relation to A. So it could be said that is the space in A is compressed and time extended? I think not. This only occurs when we have an acceleration of a referential. Only in that case we have changes in time and space.
If this is correct, every time that movement occurs, there is a referential alteration, so in our universe with a huge mosaic of referential we should have different accountabilities for time and space. But for the same referential there should be only one and present should not coexist with past and future. At least that what I think.
Why velocity is related with time enlargement? This is a consequence of the Hendrik Lorentz equation (T(me) = T(you) / �1- (v2/c2)). When our velocity (v2) increases and reaches light velocity (c2) than the T(you) tends to infinite.
According to restrict relativity, A) at a constant velocity laws of physics are constant; B) light velocity is constant independently of its fount of emission; C) with acceleration space is shortened and time elongated.
This is very puzzling for me, and very interesting since it can have implications in the so called “block universe�, i.e., a universe that coexists with time in blocks, with present, past and future coexisting all together.
Independently of being in a universe eternalist or presentism, time flows with a fixed direction. Why with a certain direction? According to second law of thermodynamics (Ludwig Boltzmann) since the “origin� of the universe � the big bang � all the known universe is increasing it’s entropy. And is this increase that gives time a sequence from past to future, from low entropy to higher stats of entropy (biological processes can trick and bypass some of this process, through acquisition of information). All we know will end in the heights level of entropy.
If that is the tendency, why had the universe a start? According to thermodynamics all have emerged from casual fluctuations of the universe that had put the universe in a very improbable state, i.e., one with the lowest entropy possible. Quantic physic has another explanation and according them time flow is a consequence of measurements in a quantic state.
But this is my opinion (the sequence of time has presentism characteristic) and not the author point of view (although I don’t quite understand what he stands for). According the author there are two visions about time (in true, there is a third perspective. As the physicist George Ellis had stated, only the past exists. The present is a wave vibration of the past, and the future is frozen and is yet to come. There is a place for free will!), one Eternalism and another with Presentism. Over its book, Buonomano takes some deductions about the implications of these two perspectives in brain’s time function, free will and accountability for our actions. For presentism, conscience can be real. For the eternalism it should be difficult to explain brain functions namely conscience since it would be difficult to rationalize it in a particular time/space block. Conscience depends on a sequence of frames and cannot be explained in an isolated frame.
Nerveless, eternalism points to a pre-existent future. All scenarios are possible and exists in different blocks. This is hard to accept and collides with our understanding of free-will, that is much more in line with presentism theories. This may be so, but, and it is also demonstrated, that when we take a decision our neuronal activation precedes the conscience of the action that we are going to take. Saying that, our free-will is not so free, and is determined previously to our take of conscience of it. In other words when we decided one action, the decision was already made in our neuronal network, and was taken without our conscience of it.
Another question is about who is moving and flowing through time. Is time flowing or time stands still, and we are moving through time? This could be an interesting scenario since if we are moving in a space/time block universe, we could move forward and backward.
I think that this movement is somehow achieved in dreams when our conscience disconnects of our image and we are dreaming and watching ourselves. If this is so, conscience disengages of our image and enters in another referential where space and time have other meanings.
Discuss time concept and its implication on brain function is the purpose of the book, but It was not accomplished because it lacks a clear master line, and many of the data referred are somehow anecdotal (it’s approach to the subject is an excessive popular science). Examples given by Buonomano to emphasize brains control of time are so loosely presented that I could added others body examples of time machine: heart rate, stomach hungry, bladder function, or the hair growing (one millimeter every 3 days), etc.
When approaching chronobiology, the author says that the major biological rhythms have a cycle of 24 hours, with a tendency for the majority of people to be a bit longer (this is confirmed in several studies cited by the author). According to this data, people will tend to adapt better to progressive shift changes. This may be so for many people but for some Jet leg is more intense when they travel anti-clockwise. This may be because for some people the daily biorhythm is higher than 24 hours when for other is smaller. There are nightingales and owls. This could be better discussed.
Neurons have chronotropic capacity. This was well established by the author when he described experiences with neuron in culture. After incubation with a proper photosensitive gene, it was demonstrated that these neurons in culture could anticipated stimulus producing a protein. So, they have chronotropism ability.
Curious is the reference of brain capacity to control smalls amounts of time through the elaboration of neuronal circuits. The brains have a huge capacity of control smalls amounts of time. As time intervals increase brain loses this accuracy. This is important for the control of language (small times are important in oral language, and author gives several examples), mimicry, Morse code, etc. But rhythms and mimicry presented by some animals (primates and birds) are dependent on the presence of “mirror neurons� described by Giacomo Rizzolatti in 1937 not just neuronal circuits to control time. This must be known by the author.
One other important issue approached by the author is the way we count time. There two ways. One in retrospective: how long as it passed and another one in prospective: how long is this going on. Both counts are not coincident. When an action is boring, prospective time is long, but retrospective is short (children’s in a car travel). When an action is exiting, prospective time is short but retrospective time is long. This is remarkably interesting but does not allow the author to assume that this may be the justification for time stands still in traumatic situation and in their evocation in post-traumatic stress. In post-traumatic stress it is the sensitive memory that works. We may not remember what had happened (point by point), but we recall what we had felt. Therefore, small things like sounds, lights, or pictures can trigger post-traumatic stress events.
According to Einstein, all physical event that can be reproductible can be used in time measurement. In neuronal tissues vibrations and their neurological progressions and depolarization can be used as time device. But I do not believe that brain builds neuronal networks each time that we want to control time. I know if my pen follows into the flor it takes 100 ms and a sheet of paper takes 3 x more. My brain can compare times and do not need to build a neuronal circuit each time that he wants to act like a chronometer.
In the description of time control Buonomano also refers neuroplasticity, neuronal alternance activation, and refractory periods after stimulus as important tools for brain time control. In cerebral function chaos theory are certainly applied. Small variations may have huge differences in the outcome.
There is enough evidence that our interactions with reality starts with a relation with space (this had been demonstrated in children) and time perception is secondary to space perception. This may be true but does not justified the author suggestion that our time reality is block based and present, past and future can coexist simultaneously. But the question: is time a reality or a construct of our mind?, still remains
A construct or not, I think is an illusory question since every biological process has the some direction. The strange case of Benjamin Button is only a picture, and never observed in real live.
So, it seems that time flows. For many psychologists a mental time travel (as the capacity of anticipate the future) is a cognitive capacity of evolved animals. This may be so, but there are many obvious supports that many animals can plan and anticipate the actions of rivals (for food and mates) and predators. But undoubtedly for humans this capacity is loudly higher.
For future planning we must to resort to our memory. Buonomano divides memories in episodic and semantic. Episodic memory is a descriptive one. It is a memory without time. We know that the capital of France is Paris, but we do not know when we had learned that. In the semantic memoir we know facts and recognized when they happened. This kind of memory is located in time. This is probably true, but this is a sensitive memory, and sensitive souvenirs tend to persist longer in our memory. In a traumatic event we may not know exactly what happened but we never forget what we had felt. As I have said, this underlies the post-traumatic events.
Curious is the fact of people with amnesia could not plan the future (fact also experimentally demonstrated). Future planning is also a cultural characteristic. For instance, the Brazilians Indians Pirahãs, do not plan the future more than some days ahead. When the linguist a missionary Daniel Everett had try to catholicize them, they asked if the missionary had known Jesus. As he told them he did not, they don’t show any interest of knowing Jesus. The result was the conversation of the missionary to atheism.
This book addresses time in a physical approach, what results in two concepts: eternalism and presentism. Both concepts have several implications on ethics, moral and physiological issues, and the author discuss these implications and also their consequences on conscience itself. Doing that, and for me one of the major flaws of the book is the author’s approach on conscience without (not one, but several and important) references to António Damásio work. No one can discuss conscience without knowing Damasio theories on the matter.
August 19, 2020
Ein perfektes Buch, dass sich zwischen Physik und Neurowissenschaften ansiedelt und mit Hilfe der neuesten Erkentnisse aus der Phyisik die Zeit erklärt. Haben wir ein Areal im Gehirn, dass für das Zeitverständnis zuständig ist?
In diesem Buch vereint sich alles was man in den letzten Jahren über die Zeit gelernt hat.
Von Einsteins Relativitätstheorie, Kappa Effekt bis zu menschlichen Experimenten und deren innere biologische Uhr!
Auch die Schreibweise des Buchs ist auf einem angenehmen Niveau!
In diesem Buch vereint sich alles was man in den letzten Jahren über die Zeit gelernt hat.
Von Einsteins Relativitätstheorie, Kappa Effekt bis zu menschlichen Experimenten und deren innere biologische Uhr!
Auch die Schreibweise des Buchs ist auf einem angenehmen Niveau!
January 11, 2021
A fantastic topic, and I read about it a bit from both the neurological angle as well as the physical angle before, but never thought about what it would mean to put both together. Obviously the book doesn’t have answers, but I have a much better understanding of all the things we just.can’t.explain. And I am pretty sure it will keep me entertained to spot the different perspectives different sci fi Stories take on Time Travel from now on :D. However, it is hard and dry to read at times, if I wouldn’thave known quite a bit about how our brain functions (and I mean down to synaptic processes and the different areas in our brain, from prefrontal cortex to hippocampus) I probably wouldn’t have made it through. The philosophical aspects also feel sometimes just like being thrown in for good measure without really tying them into the content (especially the final chapter about free will). All in all a fascinating topic that just can’t be summarized in just book, but deserves the attempt, with one star subtracted for very dry neurological deep dives and abrupt philosophical detours.
January 22, 2022
always so humbling to read about trippy science concepts that I don’t understand
March 16, 2023
This is a book about time, both the physics of time, and how our brains understand and manipulate time.
Many animals have the ability to learn from experience, and to project how to hunt, hide from predators, and other things necessary for higher animals to survive in their relatively complex worlds. Humans are the only animals whom we are certain can reflect on the past, plan for the less immediate future, and imagine things that don't have a lot of connection to the real, immediate world. The list of animals whom we have some evidence may share this ability has expanded over my lifetime, but it still doesn't seem to be a common ability.
With our minds, we can in some sense travel in time.
Yet we don't really understand time. We can't really describe time or how we move in it. Unlike space, physically, we can only travel in one direction in time--into the future. All of our words for motion in time are borrowed from our words for motion in space. Over the last century, we have learned that time isn't separate from space; spacetime is one thing.
We don't really have a full understanding of how it works, as whole, but especially the time component.
And yet, we can dwell in the past, and imagine the future.
Buonomano discusses both the physics of time, and how our minds manipulate time. He can't do that without equations, and though he does try to limit that, and to explain the equations clearly, it's one of the less accessible books on either physics or the mind that I've tackled. Still, I did enjoy it, and do feel that I learned from it.
If you find the math more accessible than I do, you'll get more out of it than I did. Do consider giving it a try.
I bought this audiobook.
Many animals have the ability to learn from experience, and to project how to hunt, hide from predators, and other things necessary for higher animals to survive in their relatively complex worlds. Humans are the only animals whom we are certain can reflect on the past, plan for the less immediate future, and imagine things that don't have a lot of connection to the real, immediate world. The list of animals whom we have some evidence may share this ability has expanded over my lifetime, but it still doesn't seem to be a common ability.
With our minds, we can in some sense travel in time.
Yet we don't really understand time. We can't really describe time or how we move in it. Unlike space, physically, we can only travel in one direction in time--into the future. All of our words for motion in time are borrowed from our words for motion in space. Over the last century, we have learned that time isn't separate from space; spacetime is one thing.
We don't really have a full understanding of how it works, as whole, but especially the time component.
And yet, we can dwell in the past, and imagine the future.
Buonomano discusses both the physics of time, and how our minds manipulate time. He can't do that without equations, and though he does try to limit that, and to explain the equations clearly, it's one of the less accessible books on either physics or the mind that I've tackled. Still, I did enjoy it, and do feel that I learned from it.
If you find the math more accessible than I do, you'll get more out of it than I did. Do consider giving it a try.
I bought this audiobook.
March 20, 2025
"That was a long time ago."
Imagine you are on a hillside, and you see a church in the distance. It's a long way away. It might even take you a long time to get there. But that can't be, because "long" is a word used to describe space; it describes the distance between two points. Time cannot be long. But we have no other ways to interpret time other than spatializing it, and this is consistent across every culture in the world. Indeed, the spatialization of time is not a cultural phenomenon but one of the brain: We are not able to interpret time without spatializing it.
What are the implications of this? Are we able to separate space and time? If not, what does this mean for our future research? Does the past exist, or is only the present real? Why do boring moments seem to drag on forever? Why do cherished weekend getaways feel like a lifetime in our memory? How are we able to mentally time travel—that is, project ourselves into the future in order to adequately plan for events?
Dean Buonomano answers these intriguing questions in his seminal work on the neuroscience and physics of time. If you enjoyed Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time, make this your next read. Buonomano provides a neurobiologist's perspective on the same fundamental question Rovelli grappled with: Why does time seem to flow?
The more I see this book on my shelf, the more I realize it was one of my favorite reads.
Imagine you are on a hillside, and you see a church in the distance. It's a long way away. It might even take you a long time to get there. But that can't be, because "long" is a word used to describe space; it describes the distance between two points. Time cannot be long. But we have no other ways to interpret time other than spatializing it, and this is consistent across every culture in the world. Indeed, the spatialization of time is not a cultural phenomenon but one of the brain: We are not able to interpret time without spatializing it.
What are the implications of this? Are we able to separate space and time? If not, what does this mean for our future research? Does the past exist, or is only the present real? Why do boring moments seem to drag on forever? Why do cherished weekend getaways feel like a lifetime in our memory? How are we able to mentally time travel—that is, project ourselves into the future in order to adequately plan for events?
Dean Buonomano answers these intriguing questions in his seminal work on the neuroscience and physics of time. If you enjoyed Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time, make this your next read. Buonomano provides a neurobiologist's perspective on the same fundamental question Rovelli grappled with: Why does time seem to flow?
The more I see this book on my shelf, the more I realize it was one of my favorite reads.
June 26, 2022
Buonomano argues that the brain is a time machine for four principle reasons: 1) it uses memory of the past to predict the future. 2) it recognises and generates temporal patterns. 3) it creates the feeling of a passage of time. 4) it can mentally project us forward and backwards in time (mental time travel). Although I must admit, the latter three feel like an elaboration of the first.
I liked how Buonomano refers to conditioning as a form of temporal contiguity, which he ties into schematic analogies and size invariance, referring to Hume's spatial and temporal conditions of contiguity and cause before effect for human understanding. This was an unusually philosophical approach to neuroscience. Buonomano demonstrates his multidisciplinary stance throughout the book, referring to thermodynamics, theoretical physics and philosophy, while asking intriguing questions about the way we perceive the universe in relation to the architecture of the brain.
Overall, this book is excellently written. It takes a complex subject, explores it to reasonable depth, certainly more than sufficient for the lamen, and does it both without presumptions of prior knowledge and without patronising the reader. In other words, it's accessible for intelligent adults without prior knowledge in the domain, interesting and relevant to our lives. It's also academic and appropriately supported with studies and experimental evidence, with unproven yet highly believed conjecture made clear.
Some interesting points:
I liked how Buonomano refers to conditioning as a form of temporal contiguity, which he ties into schematic analogies and size invariance, referring to Hume's spatial and temporal conditions of contiguity and cause before effect for human understanding. This was an unusually philosophical approach to neuroscience. Buonomano demonstrates his multidisciplinary stance throughout the book, referring to thermodynamics, theoretical physics and philosophy, while asking intriguing questions about the way we perceive the universe in relation to the architecture of the brain.
Overall, this book is excellently written. It takes a complex subject, explores it to reasonable depth, certainly more than sufficient for the lamen, and does it both without presumptions of prior knowledge and without patronising the reader. In other words, it's accessible for intelligent adults without prior knowledge in the domain, interesting and relevant to our lives. It's also academic and appropriately supported with studies and experimental evidence, with unproven yet highly believed conjecture made clear.
Some interesting points:
August 9, 2019
excellent
August 5, 2023
This is a middling effort made all the more disappointing due to (i) the inverse correlation between the promise of the title/subject and the quality of the text, and (ii) the wealth of better treatments of the topic in other popular neuroscience titles. This book gathers together many of the same studies and factoids found in other works, but often explained in a more muddled way. It sometimes felt like hearing an anecdote told secondhand, with the concomitant loss of context and detail.
Part of the issue is that Buonomano starts with an ambitious premise: he's trying to explain both the ways brains cognize time, as well as the physics of time itself. In practice, the product extruded is an anemic amalgam of both: the neuroscience thesis is mostly that the brain understands time in a spatialized way, and the physics is fretting over the consequences of living in a block universe. Buomomano inaccurately treats the 4D block universe as a consensus scientific view, then butts his head against it, struggling to square the presentist temporality of our brains with the eternalism of the block. He disregards completely the competing views and richer considerations on the questions of entropy and the arrow of time in the physics community. However, his descriptions of general and special relativity are not too bad for a short summary.
There's a lot of repetition in this relatively short book, including a lot of "we just don't know enough to confidently answer about these mysterious mysteries!" that really could have been snipped with little violence to the argument. While the table of contents looks reasonable, the structure of the work in practice feels much more scattershot. For example, I found more useful discussions of the psychology of time in the second half, ostensibly about physics.
The kernel to extract here, such as it is, is that our brains likely evolved first to process spatial relationships, and this circuitry was later adapted and/or accreted to account for time while retaining some of the distortions and baggage of its history. Further, consciousness itself appears heavily doped with temporality, as our ability to hold past events in mind to predict the future gave us an evolutionary advantage that now represents the distinctively human condition. Buonomano makes much of why we experience time sequentially within a block universe, although a lot of his wheel-spinning feels like he's forgotten that we coevolved with this universe, so our neural architecture is picking out a useful element of reality even if it's not fundamental to it.
Ultimately, I didn't hate this but found it quite inessential. It's disappointing because the title portends a sizzler. Instead, you get a wan imitation of much better books from the neuroscience and the physics worlds. Sometimes, two great tastes together are less than the sum of their parts. Such is the case here.
Part of the issue is that Buonomano starts with an ambitious premise: he's trying to explain both the ways brains cognize time, as well as the physics of time itself. In practice, the product extruded is an anemic amalgam of both: the neuroscience thesis is mostly that the brain understands time in a spatialized way, and the physics is fretting over the consequences of living in a block universe. Buomomano inaccurately treats the 4D block universe as a consensus scientific view, then butts his head against it, struggling to square the presentist temporality of our brains with the eternalism of the block. He disregards completely the competing views and richer considerations on the questions of entropy and the arrow of time in the physics community. However, his descriptions of general and special relativity are not too bad for a short summary.
There's a lot of repetition in this relatively short book, including a lot of "we just don't know enough to confidently answer about these mysterious mysteries!" that really could have been snipped with little violence to the argument. While the table of contents looks reasonable, the structure of the work in practice feels much more scattershot. For example, I found more useful discussions of the psychology of time in the second half, ostensibly about physics.
The kernel to extract here, such as it is, is that our brains likely evolved first to process spatial relationships, and this circuitry was later adapted and/or accreted to account for time while retaining some of the distortions and baggage of its history. Further, consciousness itself appears heavily doped with temporality, as our ability to hold past events in mind to predict the future gave us an evolutionary advantage that now represents the distinctively human condition. Buonomano makes much of why we experience time sequentially within a block universe, although a lot of his wheel-spinning feels like he's forgotten that we coevolved with this universe, so our neural architecture is picking out a useful element of reality even if it's not fundamental to it.
Ultimately, I didn't hate this but found it quite inessential. It's disappointing because the title portends a sizzler. Instead, you get a wan imitation of much better books from the neuroscience and the physics worlds. Sometimes, two great tastes together are less than the sum of their parts. Such is the case here.
July 6, 2018
It contains a good amount of recent thought about the workings of the mind and the timespans that we require to build a narrative of our experiences and react accordingly. There is a lot of discussion about the history of time as a concept that I have read many times before, which I read with pleasure, despite knowing most of it, because time is a subject I have been passionately interested in since the 90s.
He briefly mentions and dismisses George Ellis' idea that time exists in the past exactly as described in standard theory, but that the present moment is a special state that becomes time and space, which has been the prime reason for my fascination with time. Even his brief mention of Prof. Ellis' theory, which matches exactly my long-standing intuition, caused me unspeakable joy. Not many people will ever feel the incredible relief of finding their private thoughts transformed, in a moment, from a "cock-assed" idea into a respectable theory by an eminent professor of mathematics, but I can attest that the feeling is incredible.
He ends by touching on the obvious fact that when we project plans into the future we are doing something only a few exceptionally smart animals can do very crudely, hence the title. In sum, a readable, fairly comprehensive look at some recent experiments in neuroscience and the nature of time as seen in current physics.
He briefly mentions and dismisses George Ellis' idea that time exists in the past exactly as described in standard theory, but that the present moment is a special state that becomes time and space, which has been the prime reason for my fascination with time. Even his brief mention of Prof. Ellis' theory, which matches exactly my long-standing intuition, caused me unspeakable joy. Not many people will ever feel the incredible relief of finding their private thoughts transformed, in a moment, from a "cock-assed" idea into a respectable theory by an eminent professor of mathematics, but I can attest that the feeling is incredible.
He ends by touching on the obvious fact that when we project plans into the future we are doing something only a few exceptionally smart animals can do very crudely, hence the title. In sum, a readable, fairly comprehensive look at some recent experiments in neuroscience and the nature of time as seen in current physics.
couldn-t-finish
March 20, 2021I really tried with this book, started to consider it dropping after 10 percent, but reached 30%. The topic is really interesting. My problem was that the writer tries to explain you scientifically, but in order to do that he mentions ten more topics. For me it was a mess. If that would be a book for my phd, I would skim read it within an hour, use it as a general reference in order to compensate in any way my one hour, maybe get annoyed that I could read it more profoundly to find something more useful in the book for a reference and be done with it.
I don't in any way underestimate the writer as a scientist or the value the book has in the scientific world, but if he wanted this book to be popular among non professionals, he should have tried to express the ideas in more a systematized manner.
I don't in any way underestimate the writer as a scientist or the value the book has in the scientific world, but if he wanted this book to be popular among non professionals, he should have tried to express the ideas in more a systematized manner.
October 14, 2023
Цю книжечку я привезла з Ташкенту)
От відразу впала в око й тепер знаю чому - чергове підтвердження моєї власної теорії всього, що відбувається у Всесвіті))))
Думаю, вона є в кожного))
А якщо немає майбутнього, минулого та теперішнього?
І все відбувається в одному відрізку часі одночасно.
Книжка читається так приблизно як книги Стіва Гокінга)
І мені більше нагадала дослідження з фізики, ніж з нейробіології)
Для повноцінного розуміння загальної картини - новітні дослідження з квантової фізики вам в поміч)))
А то в якийсь день прокинемося, а виявляється, Земля не пласка, й не тримається на трьох слонах)))
#451deepreading
February 26, 2021
More tremendous brain wonderment from the neuroscientist who brought us Brain Bugs.
The brain's ultimate purpose is predicting the future using lessons from the past and present. A wonderful and "miraculous" time machine.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The brain's ultimate purpose is predicting the future using lessons from the past and present. A wonderful and "miraculous" time machine.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
October 6, 2021
The author packs a lot of concepts in a short book that reads like a long conversation about our perception of time.
October 31, 2021
Very interesting book, very complete, and the writing is very well done, however at times the neuroscience examples drained my brain...
I do recommend the book, however Rovelli's book: The Order of Time is way better (they do have different approaches)
I do recommend the book, however Rovelli's book: The Order of Time is way better (they do have different approaches)
August 29, 2023
A great introduction to the concepts broken down without too much jargon for everyday folks who aren’t in the field. Personally, the last two chapters on the relationship between consciousness and concepts of time were what I found most engaging and would have loved a book on.
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