Your Brain Is a Time Machine

The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

De: Dean Buonomano

Narrado por: Aaron Abano

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.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2017 Dean Buonomano (P)2017 Audible, Inc.

Time was I knew what time was.

I look forward to re-listening to this book to remember the enjoyment I feel now.
Great topic with excellent execution.

Author drowns in the flow of time

The author presents very interesting facts and data about the physics and neuroscience of time, but in the that's all the reader is left. The author fails to adequately draw a conclusion

Comprehensive

I really appreciated the way the author addressed time from multiple perspectives and acknowledged what we don't know about the nature of time. The book is definitely accessible to the non-scientist. Would probably be best, though, to have had some introduction to the notion that all of what we perceive as "real" is a construction of the mind/brain, before wading into this book, because there is little "breaking in" of this idea, other than to acknowledge that much of our perception is an "illusion" created in/by the brain (eg, pain, color, etc.). I would definitely recommend the book to anyone who wants to wrestle with the concept of time.

Especially

interesting! Why? Because the author, just like the rest of us, really doesn't know what time is. But he did have some very interesting ideas to what makes us think we know...

A '10' for Cognitive Science, a '0' for Time

Score:
Time and the Philosophy of Time: Zero
At several points I wondered how long the author could talk without saying anything of significance. You get mountains of twaddle. The author also has no clue as to what time is (a tool for tracking change). He comes close once or twice, but falls back into popular misconceptions (that time is a component of the physical world - it is not, change is).
Cognitive and Neuroscience: Ten
He does present some interesting experiments in cognitive and neuroscience, but again, weaves in the unnecessary mysticism born of not realizing what time is (a tool, and not something 'mysterious' or 'an illusion').