Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time 1st Edition

by Dean Buonomano (Author)

28 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-0393247947

ISBN-10: 0393247945

Why is ISBN important?

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Added to

Unable to add item to List. Please try again.

Condition: Used - Very Good

In Stock. Sold by GreatDEALSFound, Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

50 Used from $12.99

FREE Shipping

Deliver to France

In Stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

This item ships to France. Want it Friday, Dec. 7? Order within and choose AmazonGlobal Priority Shipping at checkout. Learn more

List Price: $26.95
Save: $8.63 (32%)

52 New from $13.03

Deliver to France

More Buying Choices

52 New from $13.03 50 Used from $12.99

102 used & new from $12.99

See All Buying Options

Free Two-Day Shipping for College Students with Amazon Student

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.

22 illustrations

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Steven Sloman

59

Hardcover
$15.23

Editorial Reviews

Review

Apparently elastic and possibly illusory, time is a puzzle to physicists and neuroscientists alike. Dean Buonomano straddles the divide, invoking cutting-edge theory and research as he wrestles with theoften glaring mismatch between physical and 'felt' time. The result is immensely engaging.
Nature

Buonomano lays out a wealth of complex concepts in an entertaining,digestible way. He admits that both physics and neuroscience are stillfar from understanding the true nature of time, but his book will makeyou question your own perceptions and marvel at the fact that your brain is probably "the best time machine you will ever own".
Diana Kwon, Scientific American Mind

Your Brain Is a Time Machine can be disquieting, as the implications settle in, for example, of inhabiting a universe in which all moments exist. But the book ultimately leads to an internal quieting, as one realises that all the profound scientific discoveries of the past century or so are struggling with a common enemy: time.
Anil Ananthaswamy, New Scientist

Mr. Buonomano sets out boldly to accomplish what Saint Augustine did not dare--to explain time in its infinite varieties.
Carol Tavris, Wall Street Journal

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.

Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (April 4, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0393247945
ISBN-13: 978-0393247947
Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.2 x 9.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 28 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #436,118 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #111 in Books > Science & Math > Experiments, Instruments & Measurement > Time
- #202 in Books > Textbooks > Medicine & Health Sciences > Medicine > Basic Sciences > Neuroscience
- #206 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology

Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

Be the first video

Your name here

Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features:

See Kindle Edition

28 customer reviews

2 star (0%)

1 star (0%)

Review this product

Write a customer review

Showing 1-8 of 28 reviews

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Neuron

Great book on an underrated subject

May 9, 2017

Format: Hardcover

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.

66 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Topo

Interesting and informative. Despite lacking all but a superficial ...

April 28, 2017

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Interesting and informative. Despite lacking all but a superficial knowledge of physics and having a significant aversion to mathematical formulae, I found this book extremely readable. The author writes clearly and engagingly, using both humor and concrete examples to enhance the reader's understanding of a fascinating and complex subject.

27 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Zuff

All aspects of time and the brain.

February 22, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

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.

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Franks here

a solid read

November 18, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

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

Helpful

Comment

dale campbell

Five Stars

July 24, 2017

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Very good. Makes "time" accessible to a layman. Some very interesting viewpoints you probably have not thought of!

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Terence G Rapoch

Provocative

May 29, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Forces the reader to consider both the why and why not of our experiences related to time and our abilities related to it.

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Marcelle Kasprowicz

Neurobiology Meets Physics

June 27, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Discusses the complexity of the concept of time and possible explanations taken from the worlds of neurobiology--studies of the brain in particular-- and new theories in physics
A particularly interesting discussion of the concept of free will
Some difficult passages for readers like me, curious but not well versed in the above subjects.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Nataša MV

An excellent book

August 8, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

This really is an excellent book.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Comment

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway

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

Set up a giveaway

Pages with related products. See and discover other items: physics 1, physics and mathematics

Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time 1st Edition

Customers who bought this item also bought

Sponsored products related to this item (What's this?)