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Dean Buonomano was among the first neuroscientists to begin to ask how the human brain encodes time. It’s not an easy concept to grasp, Buonomano says, and for that reason[…]
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Need to know the time? Just look at a clock. But if your brain needs to tell the time, it’s a whole other different theory. Neuroscientist Dean Buonomano is an expert on brains (obviously) but posits that your brain tells time much more by a domino effect than by any sort of mechanism. He uses an interesting pebble-pond-ripple scenario to walk us through it, saying that “if you throw a pebble into a pond it can create this dynamical pattern. And in a way that pattern tells you how much time has elapsed.” Much in the same way, our brain simply looks for patterns. Buonomano goes into it in more detail than we do here in this paragraph, but the science is largely that simple: our brains tell time by looking for disruptions in the moments of zen.


Dean’s new book is appropriately called Your Brain Is A Time Machine.


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