Hey there, I'm Jason Gatz, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

Started in 2008, Big Think is a kind of online think tank of big ideas from some of the most creative thinkers on the planet.

On the podcast, we revisit these ideas in new ways.

Our producers surprise me and my guests

with short interview clips from Big Things Archives, ideas that we didn't necessarily come

here expecting to discuss. I am very, very happy to be here today with Dean Buonomano. He's a professor

of neurobiology and psychology at UCLA and a leading theorist on the neuroscience of time. His latest book, Your Brain is a Time Machine. The neuroscience and physics of time has convinced me that time is far weirder than I already knew it to be, and I already knew it was mind-bogglingly weird. Welcome to think again, Dean. It's pleasure to be here, Jason.

And I'm sorry it's even weird, so obviously

you didn't answer any of, solve any of the mysteries of time.

Well, no, I think you clarified in some ways

some of the nature of those mysteries, you know,

and some of them remain mysterious.

There are many things that you have figured out in your lab about how time happens in the brain.

But something that's at the core of the book, which I think will come back to because it's a little

complex to start there, is that there's a major schism, or some people say schism, between

how physics conceptualizes time and how, A, like, ordinary

people do in their daily lives, and B, neuroscience, like how it happens in the brain.

But let's start with the neuroscience a little bit.

Because you're doing very granular work on like neurons and then also on clusters of neurons, like what, in what ways does, you know, as simply as we can discuss it, does the brain tell time?

Yeah.

You know, what do you know about that?

So this is a very fun question for me, and I think increasingly so for the neuroscience community, is how does the brain tell time?

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