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Dean Buonomano is a UCLA neuroscientist and one of the first researchers to ask how the brain encodes time. His work overturned a century-old assumption — that somewhere in your head sits a central clock — by showing that timing falls out of the dynamics of neural circuits themselves. He wrote the bestseller Your Brain Is a Time Machine, then took the argument to physics, co-authoring a paper with Carlo Rovelli on whether the past still exists. He is a presentist in a field that mostly isn't.
Expect to learn:
- The clockless brain: why there is no central timer anywhere in your head
- Timing in a dish: how isolated brain tissue can be taught intervals
- Death and religion: how foresight forced our ancestors to invent the afterlife
- The ten-second test: the one simple thing no language model can do
- Pause the computer: the thought experiment that breaks state-based theories of consciousness
SPONSORS
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GS EPISODES MENTIONED
György Buzsáki - Meet the Neuroscientist Who Discovered That Waves Produce Memory, Spacetime and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/95FFRTIiLDY
Joseph LeDoux - Meet The World's Greatest Emotion Neuroscientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/u_yCcxQsKn0
Michael Levin - Michael Levin: Bioelectricity, Morphogenesis, Platonic Spaces & Xenobots: https://youtu.be/LTBZRVKUwyM
Michael Levin & Earl Miller - Meet the Scientist Showing Every Cell In Your Body is Conscious!: https://youtu.be/eNi-_2cOVtc
Anil Seth - No. 1 Consciousness Expert: Optical Illusions that Prove Reality is a Lie, Emotions, Books and AI!: https://youtu.be/lOSA06K0l1o
GUEST LINKS
UCLA Neurobiology Profile: https://neurobio.ucla.edu/people/dean-buonomano-phd
Buonomano Lab: http://www.buonomanolab.com/
X: https://x.com/DeanBuono
Bridging the Neuroscience and Physics of Time (with Carlo Rovelli): https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01976
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:01 The Brain Has No Central Clock
0:04:17 How Neural Population Clocks Work
0:05:40 Teaching Brain Tissue To Tell Time
0:06:57 Prediction Is Really About When
0:09:10 Even Bacteria Keep Time
0:10:27 Mental Time Travel Built Civilisation
0:11:39 Realising You'll Die Invented Religion
0:14:57 Squirrels Don't Actually Plan Ahead
0:18:19 Waking Up Before Your Alarm
0:23:29 Why Time Is Central To Consciousness
0:24:01 Block Universe vs Only Now
0:29:24 The Runner Who Lost Time
0:33:18 Why Marathons Destroy Time Perception
0:37:18 The Memories With No Timestamp
0:42:02 Your Brain Runs Many Clocks
0:43:31 AI Cannot Wait Ten Seconds
0:45:38 How Transformers Deleted Time
0:49:29 What If You Paused The Computer?
0:53:05 Could We Ever Build Conscious AI?
0:58:17 Arguing About Time With Carlo Rovelli
1:01:40 A Time Traveller Would Prove Me Wrong
1:07:05 You Can't Measure Time With Time
1:12:25 Which Theory Of Consciousness Is Right?
1:21:55 Why We Invented The Soul
.....Email for sponsorship enquiries: evan@thegiantsshoulder.com
