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

by Dean Buonomano

why humans are uniquely capable of mentally projecting ourselves into the future.

Place cells are neurons that fire, or “turn on,” when an animal is located in a specific place in a room—

is only in the twenty-first century that scientists are beginning to fully embrace the fact that “information about the past is useful only to the extent that it allows us to anticipate what may happen in the future.”

The sole evolutionary function of memory is to allow animals to predict what will happen,

One of the reasons it is the most used noun in the English language is because it is actually multiple words.

three meanings of the word time that will be important for our goals. In order, I will refer to them as natural time, clock time, and subjective time. Intuitively we understand time to be the medium in which our lives play out.