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Tuesday, September 4, 2018

Your Brain is a Time-Machine - The Neuroscience and Physics of Time - Dean Buonomano #Review

                         


The brain is an illusion factory! Well, this is how the author considers before completing his thoughts about the brain and its perceptions. Time and activities based in life are aptly considered by this author to prove how our brain is a machine that has its own way of considering events and classifying them.

The book begins with a summary of the psychology, philosophy, pharmacology and physiology of time. The author has an excellent grasp of the issues at stake and the importance of doing research on these topics. How do drugs affect our time perception, and what does that tell us about the brain? How can neurons or neural networks detect measure time?  

The book also describes a bit on the physics of time and the philosophical implications. Does time even exist, or is it (like many other things), a persuasive  illusion that the brain construes to give us an advantage in evolution? Is present-ism (only the ‘now’ exists) or eternal-ism (time is another dimension and ‘now’ is to time what ‘here’ is to space) the correct model of the universe? 

The act which we take simple has been explained in significant way: that when a baby begins to look at his mother, he views it along several angles at different times and sometimes larger (when she is close) only to stitch these pictures for composing an ultimate face in its database.  This way every one gathers data and webs a new picture or scheme of things in life. The brain records the statistics of what we see, hear and experience and uses patterns to make sense of the world around us. That the brain is an expert in 'scavenging' the information is an important point delivered.

Pavlov's dog, whose stomach acidity was measured at a constant time is used to tell how body behaves with regular time-bound activities.  This is because the brain creates the sense of time as it cannot be physically measured. We, thus the author says, do create 'future' and help ourselves comfortable with the dimension of time.Going along the nuances of time the author describes the relativity with time: "A watched pot never boils" and time flies when you have fun. Chronostasis is considered as stagnant time when you are not enjoying the physical world.

There is this mention about the 'slow motion' in life. People's ability to react quicker and perceive events is compared with a CPU processor, where the processor is designed to withstand a certain over-optimised speed. Likewise the brain enters the 'over-clock' mode.There is more mention about theory of relativity and a good explanation to it with a few examples. That a special relativity is called so because we can ignore the influence of 'gravity' is quite a new approach to explain the same.

Finally an attractive quote that I found would make a few people go sarcastic is here:  There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can't predict what they will do.The brain—the most complex dynamical system in the known universe—tells, represents, and perceives time in multiple ways. In this book of popular science, neuroscientist and author Dean Buonomano investigates the intricate relationship between the brain and time with ample examples. 

In the last chapter, the author cites the core issues. He ponders whether animals plan for the future and whether they reflect on the future in the same way that we do. There is this meeting with the Piranhã tribe who, according to an anthropologist, lived with them, lives in the here and now. The author also takes on free will. If time is just another dimension that we can, at least in theory, travel across, then that should logically mean that everything that is going to happen has already happened which presumably means there is no free will. Free will, the author suggests may only be the feeling associated with making decisions - just like we feel pain when we get painful stimulation. 

Free will, consciousness, space-time, and relativity from the perspective of a neuroscientist, drawing on physics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, 'Your Brain Is a Time-Machine' reveals that the brain’s ultimate purpose may be to predict the future, and thus that it is a time machine. 

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