Our brain is like a time machine

27. 11. 2018
6th international conference of exopolitics, history and spirituality

Our brain is like a time machine. There is an interesting difference between how animals orient themselves in time and in space. Why do we have to talk about time? From space-time to how the mind preserves time. It's more complicated, but rewarding. Nerve circuits connect with external stimuli to save time. He writes this in Dean Buonomano's new book.

"Time passes without bifurcation, intersections, departures or turns."

It does not apply that different time and space simplify the role of time comprehension, as evidenced by Buonomano:

"Physicists' words about the nature of time ended in time, but it seemed to me that it took a long time."

This captures the different concepts of time - natural time, time on the watch, and subjective time. (Chronos' time is measured by the timekeeper, chronos', subjective time, kairos')

Natural time

Natural time is what physicists are researching. Is time real or is the time of illusion, and all the moments exist essentially at the same time as there are still all the coordinates of the universe? Neurologists, on the other hand, also talk about time in lessons and subjective perception of time. In order to explain the concept of natural time, physicists and philosophers speak of the notion of eternity, according to which the past, the present, and the future are equally real.

Buonomano writes:

"There is absolutely nothing special in the present: time is eternal as well as space."

The second major explanation of natural time is the notion that real moment is real from the point of view that reflects our sense of subjective time. The past is gone, the future has not happened.

"Neurologists are time guides by default. Despite its intuitive appeal, the concept of time is irrelevant… in physics and philosophy. Subjective perception of time is a human ability, but to do that, biology must first figure out how to stop time. ”

The book called Your Brain is Time Machine by Dean Buonoman

Buonomano decided that time is both physical and subjective. The title of his book is derived from the idea that our brains are prediction mechanisms. Whenever we perceive something, his theory says that what we perceive is not an objective reality, but rather a brain construction of what causes bodily feelings. Popular theoretical considerations often ignore one dimension of anticipation, which is time.

Ability to predict

Buonomano points out that the brain continually presents real-time predictions not only about what will happen but also about when it will happen. To make this possible, the brain needs complicated mechanisms to perceive the time. In order to predict not only what happens during a fraction of a second, but what can happen in the next seconds, minutes, hours and even days, weeks, months and years.

Our brains can do wonders!

This ability to predict a long-term future depends on memory. In fact, it is the major evolutionary use of memory, as a store of information needed to predict the future. With memory and knowledge, our brains became time machines as if we could travel back and forth in time. This mental journey is a human ability that distinguishes us from other animals and hence from the title of the book. This ability seems to indicate particularly similar capabilities in animals, but evidence of animal foresight is still difficult to find.

(The author contradicts this because many animals have the ability to predict natural disasters, unfortunately the scientists do not know how animals do it.)

To use mental pathways over time, biology first had to figure out how to store subjective time. Unlike pendulum clocks. Christiane Huygens' powerful shuttle clocks were the first to keep time more accurate than hours in the human brain.

Buonoman's book is full of good details about the myriad ways in which cells (neurons) in our body save time. For example, the complex crossing of a group of neurons in the hypothalamus that regulate the main circadian (diurnal) rhythm. The circadian clock depends on the harmonic oscillations of specific protein levels. One of them is melatonin. Unlike our watches, which can recognize time in a wide range of values, the brain does not have a single clock. For example, damage in the chiasmatic nucleus does not affect the ability to recognize time intervals in the range of seconds, so there is a different subjective perception of time. If there is a clear theory of the perception of time in neurology, it is precisely that nerve circuits can perform responses to regular external stimuli. In other words, they can follow time, in all sorts of ways.

The brain is a timekeeper

When we read the Buonan book, it is not difficult to wonder how the time and its measurement penetrate our existence, whether in the form of timer instruments we create or through the mechanism of our own brain. Buonomano creates an amazing sense of how complicated the timekeeper is the brain and what an awesome task. Buonomano writes comprehensibly, almost as a literature of fact. He chose a crystalline form over the flowering prose.

He occasionally puts funny examples, for example, when he writes:

"The hummingbird's heartbeat is as hidden from our sensory organs as the continent drift time."

Buonomano's unambiguous expression is evident when he writes about the physics of time. Given that his expertise is neurology, it is not a negligible exercise. His explanation of why Einstein's special theory of relativity suggests the existence of a four-dimensional universe and the diversity of cosmic time, in which the past, present, and future coexist everywhere, makes a masterpiece for the notion of eternity.

In particular, relativity destroys the concept of concurrency: the idea that two observers who move at different speeds can not agree on the time of events. When the speed approaches the speed of light, the time intervals of the events can be seen differently by different observers.

Buonomano writes:

"If we assume that all events that sometimes occur or will ever occur are permanently placed at a certain point in the universe ... then the relative concurrency becomes less interesting than the fact that the two objects in the universe can look the same. Whether they are identical or not, depends on the spot of the observer. The two telephone poles along the road seem to be in hiding if you stand on the same side of the road, but not when you stand in the middle of the road - it's a question of perspective. "

Eternity

Eternity interferes with our subjective experience of the passage of time - in other words, physics is struggling with neurology. So far, we perceive the flow of natural time, and we instinctively support this concept. Buonomano points out that our notions of subjective time are complexly linked to our ideas of space.

It shows using the metaphors we use when we talk about time:

"We'd be studying for a long time ... looking for a backward look was a terrible idea."

The timer in the brain co-optes the neural circuits that are used to present space. This is how we perceive time and space in a similar way, in a curious analogy to the special theory of relativity.

The most interesting question

This leads to one of the most interesting questions raised in the book:

"Can our physical theories be made up of the very architecture of our brain?"

Now that we know that the brain itself shortens time in space, it is also worth considering whether the concept of eternity benefits the fact that it resonates with the architecture of the organ responsible for the choice between eternity and present. Could our physical theory be formed by the very architecture of our brain? The state of scientific knowledge about time is such that we have no direct answers.

The book, which is for the most part persuasive, discusses more of the questions raised before the end answers. Of course it is because "our subjective feeling of time is somewhere in the midst of a storm of unsolved scientific secrets - what is consciousness, free will, relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nature of time. Our brain is like a time machine. This can be worrying, because we can find the consequences in the universe, for example, where all the moments of the moment exist at the same time. The book eventually leads to inner peace when we realize that all the major scientific discoveries of the past century, so or so, are fighting with the common enemy - time.

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