A review by lbrex
Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time by Dean Buonomano

5.0

Dean Buonomano is a neurobiology professor at UCLA and he's published an interesting exploration of physics, neuroscience, and the overlap between the two. I found this very readable and interesting, mostly for its insights into the brain, though Buonomano is also good at boiling down complex physics concepts to make them understandable. For the most part, the book is about how humans are able to experience "mental time travel," i.e. the ability to remember a specific experience in the past and provide it with a timestamp of sorts, and, similarly, to anticipate what we might be doing in the future. I'm not sure that the term "mental time travel" is the best term for what he's discussing, but the book is insightful nonetheless. Ultimately, the book argues convincingly for how consciousness and our conscious sense of the present are largely coherent fictions engineered by the unconscious brain, though they are often approximate and delayed in their renderings of the outside world. If you're a fan of physics or neuroscience, I think you'll find this an interesting read.