Your brain is a time machine.
“Time is a road without any bifurcations, intersections, exits, or turnarounds.” With that, neuroscientist Dean Buonomano sets up the meat of his new book, Your Brain is a Time Machine – and an intriguing difference between the way we animals navigate time as opposed to space.
Not that contrasting time and space makes the task of understanding time any easier, as Buonomano illustrates later: “The physicist’s talk on the nature of time ended on time, but it seemed to drag on for a long time.” This captures various notions of time: natural time, clock time and subjective time.
Natural time is what physicists fuss about. Is time real? Or is the passage of time an illusion, and do all moments in time exist in much the same way that all coordinates of space exist? Neuroscientists, on the other hand, fuss about clock time and subjective time.
I enjoyed James Gleick’s Time Travel: A History, which looked at time travel from a literary/cultural perspective. Buonomano gives the neuroscientific perspective.
Suddenly remembered the Christopher Reeve movie Somewhere In Time, which played in Manila theatres for a month. Reeve played a man obsessed with a beautiful woman (Jane Seymour) he had seen in a painting. Unfortunately she had lived decades before him. So he wills himself into the past by wearing the clothes from that era and concentrating on an old coin. Yeah, it was dopey. I wear my clothes from the 90s, listen to music and watch movies from the 90s, but I’m still in 2017.
Which era would you like to have lived in?
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
