Tweet is twitter. Com booktv or post a comment on our facebook page, facebook. Com booktv. Welcome, everyone. I direct programs at the museum of art where we do our best to channel the traditions of the high himalayas and offer them here in the 21st century, and what are we scoring tonight, this is called brainwave where we pair my scientists to attempt to figure out what this thing we think of as reality actually is, we are going to find that out tonight no question. So this whole series is based on the idea of perception. Those who have visited the shrine room will know that the shrine room is devised as a sensory experience. You not only see things but you smell the fragrance in the air. Are you allowed to touch . Dont touch the precious object if you dont mind. You take the whole thing in. You can hear the sounds and you also realize how limited you are in terms of your perception because you are not taking everything in. In tibetan buddhism there are not five senses, there are six senses and the sixth sense is consciousness. The process, the input from the socalled outside world. What has time got to do with that because that is what we are going to explore today. The notion of where time is something that is relative or fixed or there is a future or there isnt, some might think given our present situation that there is no future but lets take courage and explore the nature of time both past, present and everything in between. Maybe these are just words and they dont mean very much. Dean buonomano is here from ucla, has just bought this new book called your brain is a time machine your brain is a time machine the neuroscience and physics of time. This is the way he starts his book intriguingly at the very beginning. The chapter called flavors of time. Time. Person. Year. Way. Day. Five words. What do the words have in common . Anybody want to venture . Any takers . Time. Person. Year. Way, day. I will cut to the chase. This is what he right. One could be forgiven for not recognizing them as the five most commonly used nouns in the english language time sits on top of the list with two others that are units of time is a consequence of the overwhelming importance time plays in our lives. We are not asking for the time, we are speaking of saving time, killing time, serving time, keeping time, not having time, tracking time, timeout, good time, time travel, free time and my personal favorite, lunch time. So this is about the perception of time, the vehicle we use to communicate with one another which is language but our language runs left to right. It is linear. It does that. How many people saw the film arrival . A handful of you. How many people have read stories of your life . Fewer. That is interesting. The rest of you are a real mystery tonight, congratulations, thanks for coming out not aware of what you are in for. Let me describe worries of your life which is the basis for the film arrival, these creatures, beings from another world, another spatial realm arrived on earth and try to communicate with someone who is an expert in languages use low diagrams and in the film logo grams are depicted, you dont see them in pictures described in that sense in teds story but depicted as multidimensional expressions. You can read them in three and possibly four dimensions. They communicate in this way. That is their language. The question we are going to ask first is does the language dictate the perception of time q they use language to instill in the translator and understanding of multiple futures that our lives currently. That exquisite notion is what i will leave you with because you will discover more. We are delighted to have dean buonomano here. He is a Science Fiction writer but over the course of the last 25 years with his stories he has won so many awards, not like tony but way cooler, four nebulas, four hugos and the John W Campbell award for best new writer. He is no longer a new writer thomas so well established. Please welcome dean buonomano and ted chiang. [applause] hi, ted. Taking a cue from tim maybe you could Start Talking a bit about language and time. This is something you certainly delve in in the story of your life and touch upon but maybe it would be helpful to set the stage for the discussion talk about two terms that will be helpful when talking about time in terms of how it is viewed from what time may or may not be in terms of only the present is real, the past was real, the future some configuration will be real but only the present. Another is eternity in which the past, present and future are equally real and now is an arbitrary point or arbitrary moment in time as arbitrary is here. Your story embraces the notion of past, present and future all equally real but language is present, we have verb conservations normally related based or referenced to the present. There is a sense you have to read twice because it is hard to talk about this with language because we have sentences like i remember when you will be one year old or what you will say when you are 12. It is hard to process these sentences because language is not set up to talk about that view. Can you elaborate on your view of how language constrains you or talk a bit about kind of language . I dont think there is any language that would help us understand eternal is on a visceral level. The idea of eternal is in that the future and past are just as real as the present is people who hold to that can only do so in an intellectual abstract fashion. I dont know that we are capable of really feeling it, living it. I dont think human consciousness is capable of embracing it. All language will reflect the fact that we live in the present. I think i guess animals who lack language we would say they only live they only have knowledge of the present. Humans perhaps as a result of maybe not as a result but humans have language and we have knowledge of the past as being Something Different in the future being different from the present. That is something animals do not have. The different ways our language can reflect our awareness of the past and the future different languages to offer different perspectives on that and that is one idea i was trying to explore in the story. Im reminded in terms of eternal is him enables the concept of time travel. Your story does not engage time travel directly but i am reminded in reading your book, one of my favorite lines from Douglas Adamss hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, in the distant future they finally figure out how to do time travel but they have to prohibit it, not because of the paradoxes the cause it created in terms of going back, and committing grandpaside, verb conservation is way too complicated. And i think this is something you come up against in terms of verb conjugation becomes wildly complicated in expressing ideas that may happen in the future but you can avoid by jumping in the future or the past but what is your view . You wrote a piece of fiction, but on a more serious note, what is your view . Do you think only the present is you . Do you think the universe is eternal in which the past, present and future, nobody knows the answer, what is your view . I am persuaded by arguments from physics in favor of eternalism or block the universe view. Einsteins relativity makes a case which i find pretty persuasive that the future is as real as the past or the present and it is not one that i can inhabit but on an intellectual level i understand and buy into it, so i do agree that we live in an eternal universe which is a standard view in physics, the standard view in physics is this notion that in part, driven a lot by relativity this notion that because time is relative you end up with a situation where there is no absolute simultaneity. An event near and far doesnt make sense to ask if they are occurring simultaneously, this the block universe ted mentioned in which everything has been laid out. This creates a severe clash with intuition of time passing, time flowing in which the past is inaccessible, it is gone. We certainly feel that way and the future is wide open. There is this clash between the physics of time and the neuroscience of time. You feel this is an illusion . Our sense of time is flowing . The idea here is if everything is already laid out in a block universe time wouldnt really flow as much as it would just exist. This flow of time, very salient experience, physicists have struggled in this, would be illusory in some sense. Do you see this clash or does it bother you . Depends what we mean by illusion. I think physics does not say we ought to be able to remember the future. Why it really makes sense we can only remember in one direction and not the other. In the sense that there is no expectation that we ought to remember the future so it is not so much an illusion that we dont experience eternalism. It is a function of just the way either our brains work or perhaps the way any Information System can work. Not physically our brains but anything. Just to explain a little bit what im talking about, question of why we can remember the past but not the future. What is the difference between the past and future from a physics standpoint . There is an arrow of time that is a result of thermodynamics, increasing entropy. If we say the universe started with the big bang that was a state of extremely low entropy and if the universe ends in Something Like the heat death that is a state of extremely high entropy and there is a steady increase of entropy from one end to the other in a block universe. So why is it that we feel that we are moving in one direction as opposed to the other direction . There is a theory that memory, based on some work on information theory and interaction with thermodynamics that recording any information and reading this information, that would inevitably involve an increase in entropy. If this theory is correct, any event that is recorded would have to be closer to the low entropy end of the block universe then the time of recording so that means any memory would have to be of the lower entropy direction and that is what we call the past. If it is correct, it would be impossible to remember the future because that would mean that would require accurate recordings of a higher entropy state and it seems like maybe that is physically impossible. If that is true then any Information System including our brains could only contain Accurate Information about one direction which is the lower entropy direction. We call that the past. So as we record more information we sort of perceive that as our consciousness moving through time. The notion of asymmetry of time in which if we live in an eternal universe it should be why dont we, quote, remember the future, as a character in your story would say i remember when this will happen along those lines but it is a profound scientific question, physics and neuroscience have to collaborate. The standard view is because of relativity and fundamental laws of physics, dont seem to have any special meaning for the present. The present seems as arbitrary as before. If that is the case and time doesnt really flow, we have to decide if we want to interpret our sense of time as an objective observation about the universe. It seems like time is flowing, it seems like the present is evolving into the future. It seems like the actions i make now affect the future but is that, should we take that as an empirical observation that physics has to explain or is it just a trick of the mind of one sort or the other, and illusion . And neuroscience has to explain . We should clarify and say even though the standard view in physics tends toward eternalism, there is nothing anyone can call empirical proof of the past, present and future. Depending who you ask, different physicists will give you different answers but in my view it is better expressed, the simplest using occams razor, the simplest interpretation of relativity but other aspects of physics dont necessarily mesh with that including Quantum Mechanics which is a different treatment of time so it gets complicated but in terms of consciousness, whether consciousness is compatible it raises the issue of determinism and free will and what consciousness is. Consciousness is probably not a linear narrative about the passage of time. We seem to be evolving abcd, consciousness seems to maybe emerge in fits and bursts and an example of language i would use to express this, this is a hard concept to wrap your head around but i will say two sentences and you can follow in your brain how to interpret them. The first is the mousepad was beside the computer. Second, the mouse was hungry. The meaning of the word mouse is very different in both cases was one is living animal, what is the computer. You can only interpret the meaning of that word mouse as a word that came after, the mouse if consciousness has linear flow of eventss taking place it would be hard to explain. Most people probably dont feel that they understood the word mouse, went back and edited it. It is probably served, your brain waited until the appropriate moment or your unconscious brain defeating a conscious narrative to your mind. I to resolve these issues, this question of whether consciousness as we know it is compatible with physics or that interpretation, it would be interesting one of the few fields neuroscience and physics have to collaborate more in my view. I guess i feel like that, the question you bring up about making sense of these sentences, that is certainly a question cognitive science demands from linguistics, not sure it is a question for physics. I agree that it does indicate that our conscious perception as we make sense of language, that is something being constructed and it is not immediate, we are probably lagging behind our sensory input, some delay so we are hearing the words and we are not really making sense of them. We are not making a narrative aspect like a second or so so that gives us time to parse sentences but again, not sure there is a physics, something physicists need to the intersection, a decision of whether we should interpret conscious perception of the flow of time as empirical evidence so take another aspect of human cognition people interpret, perception of color. Color is an illusion created by the mind because color doesnt exist in physics which would exists is wavelength, electro magnetic radiation. Color is the brains interpretation of the wavelength of electro magnetic radiation and subject to illusion but it has an evolutionary advantage, color is innocent illusion that correlates tightly with physical processes. Done really flow but is sort of more static, then we have to, i think, also begs the question of, well, what would be its evolutionary value . If we have a sensation that has no correlation in physics. I think the need for the traction is to come together with this interpretation. Should we accept determinal jim as an interpretation or as a fact, and then if we should take our subjective sense of the passage of time which the constitutes aint empirical observation of the world . Does the sense of time count . That is what i mean by the intersection. er right in youre right the sense that man of those questions are about cognitive neuroscience but to determine if we should accept this or not as a physical observation is where the intercommunication would be a bet more beneficial. But time will tell. Yeah. Could be wrong. So, when you say, like okay, what is the adaptive advantage of perceiving time passage. If it doesnt flow yes. If theres no actual physical correlation to that. I guess one question to ask would be, what is the alternativegiven that like, if this theory about memory inevitably being tied to an interface, no conversation knock know the future, can have accurate recordings of the future. So, that means any Information System could only sort of acrete information about what we call the past. And so what other what is the alternative that such an Information System develops some kind of subjective experience. What would that if that their is correct its a if that theory is correct its a good question. If it poses on the memory that could good a long way towards explaining this clash. But that, by the way, is the beautiful example of interaction between physics and neuroscience, right . Youre talking about, well maybe the ebb trope by explains entrope by explains this. Everybody all of its possible we wont ever be able to answer these questions. But in a related issue is the question of how the brain just tells time to again with. So we have these notions of the brain whether or not it perceive time as growing or subjective. The brain certainly tells time and everybody does this. In relation to hawk to language its interesting you mentioned earlier on is that animals dont seem to be able to have a grasp of the pastpresent and future as much as humans. Theyre more presentbased. Tend to agree with that. Theres debate the degree that is true or not. How did humans come to acquire that ability . And much of that, some people believe, its by metaphors or understanding space. People believe that our human uniquely human ability to understand time relies in part on our ability to understand spas. And this explains why we in language, most languages, use spatial net to fors to talk about time. It was very long day. In hindsight that was a bad idea and youre think, i hope this talk ends shortly. This notion we use spatial metaphors is spatially spatialize time. Whether its true in the universe or not is a very natural phenomenon and a lot of a couple of investigators studied this with very common example. ll ask the audience. Next wednesdays meeting has been moved fur two days. Who thinks the meet is now on monday . Okay. Who thinks the meeting is now on friday . We have majority of people who are egocentric with time. What that means is that if you think the meeting is on friday, that sort of implies you have this sense that youre moving through time and since youre moving, monday, tuesday, wednesday, moving it forward would end up on friday. If, on the other hand, youre static and time is moving towards you, those who raise your hand on monday, that would imply a more time centric, where time is coming towards you. And interestingly enough, this time perspective, time moving perspective, is not fixed. Actually varies according to what you are doing. One of the many examples how in language we use spatial metaphors. Another one that comes up is this issue of the future being forward. Right . Yes. Right. So we were talking about this before, that we, in english and i think all the european cultures we think of the future as being ahead of us, that the past is behind us, and that is it seems to be almost sort of baked into most languages, but it is not a universal idea. The amara of Central America think of the future as being behind them and the past as being in front of them. And this is really the first time you hear it, it seems very counterintuitive, but theres a sense in which it makes a lot of sense in that we k