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

Buonomano, Dean

ISBN 10: 1543619517 ISBN 13: 9781543619515

Publisher: Audible Studios on Brilliance audio, 2017

This specific ISBN edition is currently not available.

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.

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Review

"Our experience of time is not the same as time itself; the former is largely our creation. French philosopher Henri Bergson once publicly debated this point with Einstein and lost. If only he'd had recourse to this book, written by one of the first neuroscientists to ask how the human brain encodes time. Take that, Albert!" --New Scientist

"...invoking cutting-edge theory and research...[Dean Buonomano] wrestles with the often glaring mismatch between physical and "felt" time. The result is immensely engaging..." --Nature

"Your Brain is a Time Machine is nothing if not an entertaining read - and Buonomano is an engaging speaker, in case your paths ever cross."

--Nature Physics

"Buonomano's ambition is inspiring and his writing is rich, combining a readable style with illustrative examples."

--Chemistry World

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.

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