Your Brain Is a Time Machine Quotes

“Consider the following sentence: “Minkowski’s talk on the nature of time ended on time, but it seemed to drag on for a long time.” This contrived sentence attempts to capture 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”
― Dean Buonomano, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

“Neuroscientists rarely have to grapple with the issue of presentism versus existentialism. But in practice, neuroscientists are implicitly presentists. They view the past, present, and future as fundamentally distinct, as the brain makes decisions in the present, based on the memories of the past, to enhance our well being in the future. But despite its intuitive appeal, presentism is the underdog theory in physics and philosophy.”
― Dean Buonomano, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

“Queen Anne of England established the Longitude Act in 1714, and offered a monetary prize of over a million in today’s dollars to anyone who invented a method to accurately calculate longitude at sea. Longitude is about determining one’s point in space. So one might ask what it has to do with clocks? Mathematically speaking, space (distance) is the child of time and speed (distance equals time multiplied by speed). Thus, anything that moves at a constant speed can be used to calculate distance, provided one knows for how long it has been moving. Many things have constant speeds, including light, sound, and the rotation of the Earth. Your brain uses the near constancy of the speed of sound to calculate where sounds are coming from. As we have seen, you know someone is to your left or right because the sound of her voice takes approximately 0.6 milliseconds to travel from your left to your right ear. Using the delays it takes any given sound to arrive to your left and right ears allows the brain to figure out if the voice is coming directly from the left, the right, or somewhere in between. The Earth is rotating at a constant speed—one that results in a full rotation (360 degrees) every 24 hours. Thus there is a direct correspondence between degrees of longitude and time. Knowing how much time has elapsed is equivalent to knowing how much the Earth has turned: if you sit and read this book for one hour (1/24 of a day), the Earth has rotated 15 degrees (360/24). Thus, if you are sitting in the middle of the ocean at local noon, and you know it is 16:00 in Greenwich, then you are “4 hours from Greenwich”—exactly 60 degrees longitude from Greenwich. Problem solved. All one needs is a really good marine chronometer. The greatest minds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not overlook the longitude problem: Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Gottfried Leibniz, and Isaac Newton all devoted their attention to it. In the end, however, it was not a great scientist but one of the world’s foremost craftsman who ultimately was awarded the Longitude Prize. John Harrison (1693–1776) was a self-educated clockmaker who took obsessive dedication to the extreme.”
― Dean Buonomano, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

“As the psychologist Daniel Wegner defined it in the early aughts, free will “is merely a feeling that occurs to a person. It is to action as the experience of pain is to the bodily changes that result from painful stimulation.”19”
― Dean Buonomano, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

“In peering into the future our ancestors must have foreseen more than they were prepared to cope with: their own inevitable death. This disturbing vision perhaps led them even farther into the future, and to the invention of extreme mental time travel: they envisioned an afterlife.”
― Dean Buonomano, Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

“the”
― Dean Buonomano, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

“Christiaan Huygens was the first to use Galileo’s insights to build the first high-quality pendulum clocks. A better mathematician than Galileo, he was able to truly comprehend the intricacies of the dynamics of a weight swinging back and forth on a string. Thanks to his mathematical skills and a number of technical innovations, the clock he designed in 1657 represented a quantum leap in timekeeping technology. Before Huygens, the best clocks were off by approximately 15 minutes a day; his clock lost a mere 10 seconds a day.8 Ten seconds amounts to approximately 0.01 percent of a 24-hour day. This level of accuracy marked a milestone in the history of timekeeping: these were the first clocks designed by the human brain that were better than the clocks within the human brain.”
― Dean Buonomano, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

“synapse”
― Dean Buonomano, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

“the preceding and succeeding frames. Life, however, does not represent an argument against eternalism, because there is no need to restrict ourselves to a single frame when determining if an animal is alive or not (we can wait to see multiple frames of the movie to provide a verdict).21 A related point pertains to Zeno’s arrow paradox: can a flying arrow be said to moving if we look at infinitesimally small time slices? In a sense the answer is yes, because we can define an object’s instantaneous velocity. But unlike the arrow, conscious beings must be aware of their own “motion” within these instantaneous frames. So the question is whether a slice of the block universe can sustain the phenomenon of consciousness, or does consciousness require some temporal”
― Dean Buonomano, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

“Nonetheless, to the extent that there is a favored theory in physics and philosophy, it is certainly eternalism.”
― Dean Buonomano, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

“The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the world line of my body, does a section of the world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.”15”
― Dean Buonomano, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

“The objective world simply is, it does not happen. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the world line of my body, does a section of the world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.”
― Dean Buonomano, Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time