We are all natural time travelers — “ Your Brain is a Time Machine”

Unlike the other books I used to read in the past, this is a book that I picked up randomly from the book store and to my pleasant surprise turned out to be a great entertainment.

I tend to read books related to technology, engineering, people skill and character building. Neuroscience and Physics has no clear direct connection with my profession. It is exactly the completely out of band domain knowledge that indulged me to taste the pure joy of satisfying the fundamental curiosity I had long forgotten since a kid. I intend on making reading extracurricular books a hobby of mine to broaden my horizon as a person.

Now to my thoughts on the book. While the book was not hard to read, the ability to understand data/statistical plots helped me a long way. The book surrounds around the theme “time” and breaks into three parts of discussion. The first and second part focuses on the biology/psychology and physics view of time. The third part is where the most fun is at for me. It related free will, consciousness and ultimately one’s responsibility to how our time perceives time.

I really enjoyed the book because I was concerned the book might be a textbook that solely focuses on science theories. The book turned out to be a relatively light read where the author raised a lot of awareness on how our brain relates to what we took granted from our daily activity. For example, how does one determine where the sound comes from? Or why the visual and audio effect of one event seems synchronized when light travels way faster than the speed of sound? It was a lot of fun to realize that what seems simple and intuitive to us actually has our brain constantly working in the background. Just like technology where user is served with convenience on a platter when layers and layers of engineering effort was put in place. What we took for granted in our daily live, our brain had to do complicated processing to provide us this simple easy illusion.

While I did not agree with some of the philosophical argument towards the end of the book, a lot of theories were well presented in the right level of depth for a non-philosophical background person like me. One of the great insight that I gained from reading this book is that the mental time travel in our brain allows us to travel into the future via our brain. Such ability is unique to human being but it is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because it allows us to plan ahead to mitigate our risk to increase our chance of survival. It is also a curse because it can make us overly worrisome about what is to come and forget to live in the moment. Being a person who plans and worries a lot about the future, this is a great comfort for me to learn that my anxiety and desire to map out the future ties with the very fundamental architecture of my brain.

I really enjoyed the book, I would recommend you to give it a try if you have always been fascinated about psychology, biology and physics. As an engineer, we spend most of our time designing new technology to solve challenges in our life. It seems crazy to not know more about the very physical being that carries ourselves around. This book left me with more thirst to learn more about the human body and mind.