140 | Dean Buonomano on Time, Reality, and the Brain

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2021

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Time” and “the brain” are two of those things that are somewhat mysterious, but it would be hard for us to live without. So just imagine how much fun it is to bring them together. Dean Buonomano is one of the leading neuroscientists studying how our brains perceive time, which is part of the bigger issue of how we construct models of the physical world around us. We talk about how the brain tells time very differently than the clocks that we’re used to, using different neuronal mechanisms for different timescales. This brings us to a very interesting conversation about the nature of time itself — Dean is a presentist, who believes that only the current moment qualifies as “real,” but we don’t hold that against him.

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Dean Buonomano received his Ph.D. from the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Texas Medical School, Houston. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at UCLA. His lab studies how the brain perceives time and constructs models of the external physical world. He is the author of Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Shape our Lives and Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:04.0	Long time listeners and readers of my books and things like that will know that I have a
0:08.6	very deep interest in time, in what time is, in the physics of it, but also how it floats into
0:14.7	our everyday lives, right? We human beings use time all the time, as it were. And so that hooks
0:20.8	up with another frequent interest of us here on the podcast, which is neuroscience, how the brain
0:26.1	works and how the brain thinks about things. So there's no better person to talk to about this
0:30.5	stuff than today's guest Dean Wannemano, who's a neuroscientist at UCLA who specializes in
0:37.5	how the brain tells time, how the brain thinks about time. He's the author of two books, one is called
0:43.3	Brain Bugs, how the brain's flaws shape our lives, and the other is your brain is a time machine,
0:49.2	the neuroscience and physics of time. I have to admit, in fact, that I've often gotten this wrong,
0:54.7	you know, when I go around giving talks about time, I said something that I now realize, or I
1:00.4	recently figured out, isn't quite right about how the brain tells time, you know, we have artificial
1:07.2	time keeping and time measuring devices, clocks and so forth calendars, and basically these work
1:13.6	by looking at oscillations. It's something that happens over and over again, and we accumulate
1:18.8	a certain number of oscillations to see how much time has passed. As Dean will explain,
1:23.9	that is basically not how the brain works. The brain uses other mechanisms. It's more like an hour
1:28.8	glass than a ticking watch or something like that. But more importantly, it's not just that the
1:34.0	brain measures time. The brain uses time to model the world, right? Because our world is four
1:40.8	dimensional. There's three dimensions of space, one dimension of time. So what the brain does is to
1:46.0	construct a model of reality, because we human beings need to live in reality. We need to predict
1:51.6	what's going to happen next. We have a feeling that certain results will occur if we make certain
1:56.9	actions and so forth. Obviously, time plays a huge role here. And I think that's what is Dean's
	...

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