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

4.4 | 497 ratings

Price: 17.46

Last update: 01-06-2025

About this item

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.

Don

Time to think about time

Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2023

This fascinating book should be required reading for anyone who has grappled with quantum mechanics and the block universe theory. How can time exist all in the same realm? Is this an issue of perception for humans to exist? Or is it that the theories of relativity and spaces time are just figments of our brains? I am not smart enough to fully comprehend the mathematics of it all. And the reader does not need to be. The concepts in the book are serious pause for all us humans who must navigate our individual concepts of time. Presentism or eternalism. You decide.

In the Sticks

It’s a question, not an answer

Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2018

This is a very good book about a central question in physics, philosophy and psychology. The author does a fine job of explaining the current states of knowledge in terms I can understand as a layman and also leaving many of the deep mysteries well-defined but unsolved.

I have read a lot on the subject and this book is an excellent overview. It is humbling to remember that there may be limits to our actual ability to understand some phenomena and laws of the universe.

L. Maleki

Masterful presentation of a fundamentally difficult concept.

Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2019

This is a well written, pleasant and easy read, dealing with a subject that is complex and ill understood The description of time as a subject in physics and philosophy is challenging enough, but the author manages to wrap it all with psychology and neuroscience of the brain to produce a clear account. The style of writing is erudite, and pleasing at the same time.

Zuff

All aspects of time and the brain.

Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2018

The relation between time and the brain has many dimensions - not all of them relate to each other.
This book touches all of them. From internal circadian clocks, and synchronicity between elements, in various time scales, and their influence, to time perception and time in Physics. Do not expect to understand time itself better. As scientists we still do not understand it well enough, but the book can still teach us a lot.

Franks here

a solid read

Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2018

a good solid read on the subject, but i admit when authors use "...as i will explain in later chapters" ugh! once is acceptable, but more than that is annoying. this became annoying
but...the later chapters did indeed pay off. a decent take on the subject

Matt

You may have heard it all before...

Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2019

Unfortunately, this book is unfocused. Time is such a ubiquitous topic that it comes up in almost every discipline—and the author tries to cover them all in this book. From evolution to relativity to free will. If you read 1-2 pop-sci books a year, maybe you will enjoy this. However, if you consider yourself well read, get ready to hear a bunch of stuff you’ve heard before. The book is a missed opportunity to dig into the nuances of time and neuroscience, and instead, just grazes the surface, ultimately leaving the reader with a pile of tidbits that lack depth. If you have never thought about time, you will appreciate the grand overview.

Marc

Fascinating exploration of the brain and time

Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2019

How we perceive time and what is time anyway? The author explores in detail both issues in a very comprehensive book. However, despite the author's best efforts to make the subject approachable, it still feels overly technical at times. Regardless, he manages to explain a very complex topic in as clear a way as possible. But the brain, what a mess!

Tom

Seminal work on Time and Brain relationship

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2018

Not since I read R. Dawkins "Selfish Gene," have I enjoyed a nonfiction book as much as this one. The language is clear and concise without technical jargon, and the author manages to make it read like an unputdownable mystery. The ideas expressed in this book gave me a whole new view on where life and science is today and where they are headed.

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