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

by Dean Buonomano

This illusion is a consequence of the fact that from the day you were born, your visual system has been sampling the statistics of the world: light generally comes from above, so a bump on the wall will cast a shadow on its lower half, whereas a hole will produce a shadow along its upper lip. Just as your brain uses prior information about sources of light to infer three-dimensional shape, your brain uses its past experiences to make inferences about time and space. We all have a vast database of observations about objects and animals moving through space and time—generally at a fairly restricted range of speeds. Thus, we know that distance and time are correlated: a child watching a drop of rain slide down a window can see that the more time that elapses, the larger the distance the drop