The most recommended books about time

I first met Suddendorf – one of the three co-authors of this book – in Australia back in 2016.

He is a German professor living in Queensland (with an accent untroubled by antipodean influence), and is best known for studying the skill of “mental time travel”. From him I learnt that this is one of the foundational abilities of humanity, which may well have steered our entire evolution.

We can project our minds across the past, present, and future at will - unlike pretty much any other animal. Therefore it’s crucial as a skill if we want to take the long view, and we shouldn’t take it for granted. However, as Suddendorf and colleagues write in this terrific book, it’s also a “Promethean” talent, and is far from perfect.

If we want to take a longer view, understanding our cognitive faculties is key – this book serves as a… show more.

The most important thing I learned from this book is that “winners take breaks!” I was the kind of person who kept pushing and pushing and pushing myself because I thought that was how I would get ahead. I never understood the scientifically proven benefits of taking breaks. There’s a lot of other great stuff in here, but even that small tidbit permanently changed how I work.

Named one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2018, this indie novel proposes that a beer-guzzling car enthusiast can also be a philosopher about time and Einstein’s incorrect (!!!) theory of relativity. Main character Selraybob (also the author of this fictitious novel) is left astray by his wife. When she walks out the door, he notices two clocks that are off by seven minutes. He has an epiphany: time is simply a count! Beer is consumed, the nature of time is pondered, and a picaresque adventure begins, one that will have you laughing until the end.

What is our ‘sense of time’, and why does it vary so much depending on circumstances and our state of mind? Cognitive psychologist Marc Wittmann explores the relationship between consciousness and the sense of being an embodied agent persisting through time. Drawing on cognitive science and neuroscience, he investigates the many factors that affect our experience of time, such as occupation, impulsivity, and mindfulness.

Our best physical understanding of the universe has no place for the passage of time as a distinct dynamical process. What time it is ‘now’ is no more a fundamental aspect of the universe than what place is ‘here’. This strikes many as counter-intuitive or impossible. Philosopher Craig Callender takes the reader on a very thorough examination of modern physical theories of time in search of an explanation as to why the time of physics seems to diverge from the time of human experience. He argues that, due to the way the laws of physics are constituted, time is just the dimension that allows for the most informative explanations for physical phenomena.

Around the time my co-authors and I finished working on our book, I was browsing a favorite local bookstore and came across Ari Wallach’s little gem of a book, Longpath. While our book is all about the cognitive science of foresight, what I found in Wallach’s was a wealth of wisdom on why and how to use that foresight for good. It is a highly accessible and relatable book, as well as earnest and hopeful. Wallach points out that our current era presents an incredible opportunity to write a new future for our species. What should our telos be? While the book zooms out to the extremely big picture of the far future, Wallach ultimately finds the fulcrum of change in the small, controllable moments of our everyday lives where we have the greatest opportunity to adopt longer-term habits of thought and action.

This book introduced me to a notion I had a little understanding of but never realized how powerful it was. We think of time differently depending on our environment – our culture, our family upbringing, and a whole host of other factors.

Of course, it seems obvious, but when Robert Levine takes you on a journey around the world, closely examining the amazing ways people think about time, it will change your life. I love books that take my world and turn it upside down.

I love the way this book brings perspective to modern issues by emphasizing the idea of “deep time” – that we are part of a long history that makes our current existence possible.

By thinking in this way, we also realize that our current predicament is one that we have the tools to address, and that by doing so, we would be honoring the miracles of nature that lie behind everything we are and do. Along the way, this book also helped me understand – and teach about – a variety of important geological processes.

When I moved to San Diego I began to get interested in time perception as well as the physics of time. My colleague Patrica Churchland kindly gave me this book to read. It’s a popular, accessible book on cognitive science and time perception. I couldn’t put it down. For sure it changed my academic path. I knew the mind plays all kinds of tricks on us, but the way it creates our inner sense of time experience still amazes me. 

I’ve been wanting to dive more deeply into Ted Chiang’s fiction since seeing the movie Arrival and reading his essays in The New Yorker. This collection did not disappoint.

I happened to be reading it in the hours and days after the birth of my second child, stealing minutes to do so while breast pumping.

I kept remarking to my husband, “This man’s mind…his mind!” Dazzling. And when, a few days after birth, our baby had a serious health scare, the message of “The Story of Your Life”—that if given the chance to see a horrible future in which you outlive your child, you’d make that baby anyway—gave me the strangest, most profound comfort.