Time Is Way Weirder Than You Think
About this episode
UCLA neuroscientist Dean Buonomano explores the strange science of time. He explains that the brain did not evolve to understand time but to predict it, and that our sense of time's flow is constructed from memory, which is why novel experiences feel long in retrospect while routine stretches vanish. The conversation moves from the neuroscience of timing and amnesiacs trapped in an eternal present, to the history of clocks and how they synchronized industrial civilization, to physics' strangest claim: that time may not flow at all, and that past, present, and future might all equally exist in a block universe. Buonomano, a self-described presentist, defends free will against that view. The episode closes on practical questions: how attention and memory shape a life, and what it means to live well in time.