Your Brain Is A Time Machine - The Neuroscience And Physics Of Time

60 Seconds To What?

Your Brain Is A Time Machine -
The Neuroscience And Physics Of Time
by Dean Buonomano
W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 9780395355604

About this time of year I read a popular science book on an interesting subject if I can. Almost as a way of proving to myself that I can find interest in something other than films. I usually pick up an idea of what to read by a fleeting glance at a title as it flickers by my daily timeline on Twitter (hmm... timeline... okay, I’m totally not going there) or, more often than not, as an associated suggestion from Amazon based on something else I read from the year before.

So this year it’s the turn of Your Brain Is A Time Machine - The Neuroscience And Physics Of Time
by Dean Buonomano and, it’s a humdinger of a book. Although, it has to be said, one of my reasons for reading the tome, to challenge my current belief in the non-existence of time, alas ended with my own expectations of the universe we live in sadly re-enforced.

To explain quickly, for decades now I’ve realised there is no such thing as time, only a man made measurement which has been invented (and perfected, if that’s the correct word for movable goal posts) to allow people to synchronise certain actions... or at least to have the illusion that they are able to, for example, to pick a 'time' to meet up with each other etc. I’ve seen no real evidence that we live in anything than a mostly static world and I was, if I’m being honest, hoping this book would show me a light at the end of the tunnel. Alas, the author seems to live in the belief or acceptance of one version of reality while, at the same time, acknowledging the existence of another as a more truthful representation of what is going on... or at least accepting that it’s quite possible.

So let’s get to it... The book is set out into two main sections - Part 1: Brain Time and Part 2: The Physical and Mental Nature Of Time. Each section has six individually titled chapters and, nicely, the chapter numbers throughout are representative of 12 hours expressed in 24 hour clock time (so 1:00 to 12:00). And it’s a well written thing which starts you off gently before taking you (or rather me) into perhaps less comfortable territory... there were a couple of chapters in the middle which I was having trouble keeping up with, truth be told but, in the end, my brain edited it into a whole which makes sense and I had no real problems with it. I now know that’s what my brain did, actually, purely because I read this book and it explains something about the way the brain perceives and edits reality into something more palatable and understandable for a person, rather than present the actual, real world. Hoorah!

So the writer takes us on a tour of all kinds of interesting things starting off with the fact that three of the top five most commonly used nouns in the English language - time, person, year, way, day - are related to time. He also gives us some common sense proofs (I don’t have any common sense myself so this is always appreciated) that although the concept of time is much harder for us to comprehend as a species, it is also easier to locate in our own construct of the universe... pointing out that objects in space need three separate coordinates to locate while the way we position time it needs only one.

It also shows us the way our perceived flow of time is because we have all sorts of different kinds of body clocks which we use all the time to judge different things. He has a sense of humour too, which helps... and so is able to throw in little ‘one liners’ to demonstrate such as... “And whether you realise it or not, on a moment-by-moment basis, your brain is automatically attempting to predict what is about to ______.” He shows us how the different clocks that our brain has learned to govern our waking reality (and our sleeping reality too, presumably) all do different things and the importance that timing plays in our way of understanding the rules. For example, the timing of words when someone speaks in, in this case, English... gives us the difference between ‘Grade A’ as opposed to ‘grey day’. Or ‘great eyes’ as opposed to ‘gray ties’. He also introduces the reader to the idea of the brain using both prospective timing... where we measure as if from a stop watch when something starts... and the idea of retrospective timing, projecting back from an event such as the last grain of sand has run out, so ‘x’ amount of time must have occurred.

Over the course of reading this modestly sized, simply written but quite weighty (in other ways) tome, I found that the way an organ in the body revs up to different kinds of sounds during time means, for example, you can feel as big difference if you hold your throat and feel the vibrations generated by saying ‘ba’ and ‘pa’. So that could be a good party trick, I’m guessing (probably not but, honestly, I don’t go to parties).

Buonomano also humiliated me by getting me to add up a string of numbers incorrectly (but thank goodness it’s a common mistake by most people) and proved to me why credit cards are evil by maintaining the deliberate illusion that our instant purchase decisions are offset in our minds by the fact that we are not actually paying for them until the end of the month and that, in fact, we are more liable to make a spending decision based on this rather than if we were paying out with cash (well that explains a few things). And the fact that the way we generate the illusion of time for ourselves and the way we measure it nearly always favours a language where we are using spatial metaphors almost exclusively for the way in which we talk about it.

And this leads us nicely into Eternalism. The idea that we are living in a block universe and that time is all laid out and has already happened - what we see as past, present and future is already a static truth and our brains are just giving us the illusion of the passing of time. And then he shows us how Einstein kinda already proved this with his two theories of relativity. So...

Everybody knows the observer looking at a train type experiments. Marilyn Monroe (played by Theresa Russel) demonstrated Einstein’s own theory back to him (played by Michael Emil) in a similar experiment in director Nicholas Roeg’s wonderful 1985 movie Insignificance, if you want to have a look at a version of it which immediately springs to mind. Here Buonomano uses bullets being fired by a man standing dead centre of a train carriage from two pistols and hitting the windows at either end simultaneously. Except, when you do this thing at a very high speed, both the mechanics of the way the windows shatter differs and also, importantly, to the observer not on the train, the windows shatter at different times. Which very basically means that, it’s already happened and at least one of the observers are looking at it from a different point in physical space and that changes the angle, so to speak. He uses the idea of two observers looking at a telephone pole in a street from different angles by way of illuminating this idea. Which means that ‘time’ (for want of a better word) is nothing more than a thing in space... it’s a landscape which is already there and which can be viewed at different angles if our brains could access it in a way that perceives this truthfully. I think that’s the point being made here anyway.

Now, I’ve never really liked this idea (or known about any of these theories as it happens, I just arrived at the conclusion myself that there’s no such thing as a passage of time by what little common sense and deductive reasoning that I do happen to grudgingly possess) but I do know that I really don’t like this view of things... because it automatically knocks the idea of a person's ‘free will’ for six and takes no prisoners. So in this universe I didn’t decide to read this book and review it at all. That has always happened and that’s what the universe looks like, I’ve always written this review but it’s just now that my brain, at this moment in what I perceive as a passage of time, is thinking I have come to the decision to do so.

Now, of course, none of these things are presented as facts, just very plausible theories and, while I certainly get the idea that Buonomano also doesn’t want to believe in an eternalist state of things, he does, for me, kind of more or less prove it or, at the very least, make the most convincing case for it yet. He tells us right from the start of the book that the idea that time is a real thing which passes us by is the underdog these days and that most physicists agree that the non-existence of what we see and measure with time is already laid out and we are just accessing it at different points in a way we perceive as linear. And he does give us the caveat, of course, that our brain is limited in our understanding of the laws of physics because of the way we are capable of interpreting and understanding them (something which I always find hobbles my thinking about certain issues, like the concept of infinity, for example). However, this is countered with the last couple of chapters where he explores how we know reality isn’t what we see, instead our brain edits and presents us a pill which is much easier for us to swallow. Such as, for instance, the fact that a person speaks syllables but we don’t hear the syllables, we hear the sense behind the sounds blended in our brains as words... and that’s just one small example of how we edit and highlight what is actually there.

And that’s me done with this one for a while, I think. It’s an excellent book and I’m glad I’ve read it and, unlike most of the popular science books I’ve read over the years, I may just read this one again at some point. Your Brain Is A Time Machine - The Neuroscience And Physics Of Time is an absolute corker of a read and if you want to delve into the idea that your inner clock (or many inner clocks, actually) are just another form of you making sense of the universe (well, to be fair, what isn’t?) then I would absolutely recommend you give this one a go. It’s simply written (for the most part) and the writer also has a sense of humour (big plus there then). And now, of course, I need to try and forget most of what I’ve read here for a while because, well... because the only way I can stay sane is to constantly pretend that all my actions are my own (even though the author demonstrates they can be detected before we even know we are going to do them ourselves) and that I have a modicum of free will mixed in with my day. But, like I said, I will come back to this at some point.