Dean Buonomano

Dean Vincent Buonomano (born 1965) is an American neuroscientist and author. He is a professor at UCLA whose research focuses on neurocomputation and how the brain tells time. Buonomano has been described as one of the "first neuroscientists to begin to ask how the human brain encodes time" and has been published in various scientific journals. and Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time. Buonomano's first book Brain Bugs examines the human brain's functional strengths and weaknesses, ultimately attributing some of the brain's 'bugs' (or flaws) to evolution.

Early life Buonomano was born in Rhode Island in 1965 and lived in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada before moving to Brazil at the age of 7 in 1972. He is a proponent of the theory that timing and temporal processing are so critical to brain function that most neural circuits are capable of telling time. He developed the influential theory that the brain tells time and processes temporal information not through an internal clock as scientists worldwide had previously theorized, but instead as a result of neural dynamics. Buonomano Lab utilizes research methods such as computational modeling, in vitroelectrophysiology, optogenetics, and human psychophysics to conduct research observing how individual neurons and the brain as a whole perceive and respond to time. Neuroengineering Training Program, and the current leading member of Buonomano Lab. Buonomano attributes the success of his research to keeping his lab team relatively small. Buonomano was interviewed on the NPR talk show Fresh Air and participated in a dialogue about Brain Bugs at the Rubin Museum of Art with performance artist Laurie Anderson. He gave a talk about brain bugs at TEDx Vienna in 2017. Brain Bugs was also featured on The Wall Street Journal as a bestseller. Since its release, Brain Bugs is in libraries across the country and translated into three different languages.

Brain Bugs: How the brain's flaws shape our lives discusses Buonomano's main field of research, temporal processing, attributing much of our temporal processing to our method of memory storage. The New York Times Sunday Book Reviewer Christopher F. Chabris claimed although the idea of the brain having some major flaws was not necessarily a new finding, "Buonomano's focus on the mechanisms of memory, especially its 'associative architecture' as the main causes of the brain's bugs" is a new concept. Dean Buonomano illuminates the causes and consequences of these "bugs" in terms of the brain's innermost workings and their evolutionary purposes and ultimately both praises and criticizes the functions of the human brain arguing, "The human brain is the most complex device in the known universe, yet it is an imperfect one."

Buonomano mostly focus' on the human brain's memory storage methods with many examples of our brain's shortcomings. Buonomano points out glitches of the human brain such as our inability for mental long division or larger multiplication and our unreliable memory, especially in times of crises. By the same reasoning, Buonomano argues many of our external differences we observe between others fuels tendencies of distrust for people due to neural coding. Buonomano also highlights advertising companies that depend on the human brain's shortcomings to influence its judgment. Summarizing his work's relevancy, Buonomano states, "ultimately, who we are as individuals and as a society is defined not only by the astonishing capabilities of the brain but also by its flaws and limitations."

Buonomano's second book Your Brain is a Time Machine: The neuroscience and physics of time (Norton, 2017) was published in April 2017. The publisher Norton's synopsis states that Buonomano examines temporal processing of the brain, but with a new added element to his argument. Buonomano argues that our brains are "complex system that not only tells time but creates it".