Pop quiz, hot shot! What do cows drink?
Pop quiz, hot shot! What do cows drink? If you’re like the vast majority of people, you probably just had the word “milk” flash in your brain. That’s natural, as ‘cow’ plus ‘drink’ to most people equals ‘milk’.
But that’s your automatic system talking, and that, as neuroscientist Dean Buonomano points out, is usually the part of the brain that makes most of the bonehead decisions in life like forgetting people’s names and missing easy math problems. The reflective system, on the other hand, is the more logical and computational part of the brain.
It takes a little longer to arrive at the answer but that’s because it’s doing a much deeper dive than your other system. It’s a fascinating topic, and Dean explains it perfectly. And if you’re still wondering what the answer to the pop quiz was, your reflective system should’ve told you that cows drink water. Dean Buonomano’s new book is Your Brain is a Time Machine.
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/videos/dean-buono…
More on the book below
A leading neuroscientist embarks on a groundbreaking exploration of how time works inside the brain.
In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, brain researcher and best-selling author Dean Buonomano draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to present his influential theory of how we tell, and perceive, time. The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological flow and enables “mental time travel”―simulations of future and past events. These functions are essential not only to our daily lives but to the evolution of the human race: without the ability to anticipate the future, mankind would never have crafted tools or invented agriculture. The brain was designed to navigate our continuously changing world by predicting what will happen and when.
Buonomano combines neuroscience expertise with a far-ranging, multidisciplinary approach. With engaging style, he illuminates such concepts as consciousness, spacetime, and relativity while addressing profound questions that have long occupied scientists and philosophers alike: What is time? Is our sense of time’s passage an illusion? Does free will exist, or is the future predetermined? In pursuing the answers, Buonomano reveals as much about the fascinating architecture of the human brain as he does about the intricacies of time itself. This virtuosic work of popular science leads to an astonishing realization: your brain is, at its core, a time machine.
