Distinguished neuroscientist Dean Buonomano embarks on an “intensely entertaining” investigation of how time works inside the brain in his book Your Brain Is a Time Machine (Your Brain is a Time Machine) (Barbara Kiser, Nature). It is his contention that the human brain is a complicated system that not only tells time but also creates time; it is this system that generates our sense of chronological movement and allows us to engage in “mental time travel”—simulations of events in the future and the past. Both of these functions are critical to our daily lives and the evolution of the human race; without the ability to predict the future, humanity would have never developed tools or discovered agriculture. It is through this brilliant piece of popular science that you will come to a realization that is both weird and true: your brain is, at its core, a time machine.
