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

Author: Dean Buonomano

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General Fields

  • : $38.95 AUD
  • : 9780393247947
  • : WW Norton & Co
  • : WW Norton & Co
  • : April 2017
  • : 1.00000mm X 6.50000mm X 9.50000mm
  • : May 2016
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Dean Buonomano
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  • : Hardcover
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  • :
  • : English
  • : General Adult
  • : 2016046898
  • : 304
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  • : 22 illustrations
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Barcode 9780393247947
9780393247947

Description

In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, brain researcher and best-selling author Dean Buonomano draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to present his influential theory of how we tell, and perceive, time. The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological flow and enables "mental time travel"--simulations of future and past events. These functions are essential not only to our daily lives but to the evolution of the human race: without the ability to anticipate the future, mankind would never have crafted tools or invented agriculture. The brain was designed to navigate our continuously changing world by predicting what will happen and when.

Buonomano combines neuroscience expertise with a far-ranging, multidisciplinary approach. With engaging style, he illuminates such concepts as consciousness, spacetime, and relativity while addressing profound questions that have long occupied scientists and philosophers alike: What is time? Is our sense of time's passage an illusion? Does free will exist, or is the future predetermined? In pursuing the answers, Buonomano reveals as much about the fascinating architecture of the human brain as he does about the intricacies of time itself. This virtuosic work of popular science leads to an astonishing realization: your brain is, at its core, a time machine.

Author description

Dean Buonomano is a professor of neurobiology and psychology at UCLA and a leading theorist on the neuroscience of time. His previous book, Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives, was a Wall Street Journal bestseller.