July 2007 Newsletter, Vol. 36, No.3
Guggenheim 2007
Alan Burdick is a writer who has worked as an editor at The New York Times Magazine, Discover, and The Sciences, and was the editorial producer and senior writer for Science Bulletins, a multimedia science-news division of the American Museum of Natural History.
Burdick is writing a book on the biology of time, from genetics to cognitive pyschology to neurobiology. Burdick describes his project as a "book about time, written on time, and... the story of how I did it."
I’m writing a nonfiction book about the biology of time. People typically think of the biology of time just in terms of circadian rhythms – and I’ll be writing about those. But the book will cover a lot of ground, from genetics to cognitive psychology to neurobiology. We’ve heard a lot about time in a cosmological, Stephen Hawking kind of way. I want to know how time gets inside me, inside us, in a very down-to-earth way. In effect I’m trying to address the old Augustinian question: What is time? Where does it come from, where does it go, what does it flow though?
The neurobiology of time is particularly interesting, and there’s a lot of new science. Your brain is continuously assimilating all kinds of sensory information that reaches it at different speeds. For instance, light moves faster than sound. Yet when someone talks to you from across a table, your brain manages to synch up the sight of their moving lips with the sound of their voice, which arrives some milliseconds later. How does it do that? For a long time scientists assumed that your brain had a central clock, like a pacemaker, a background time against which all other time events could be coordinated. But that notion has changed in the past few years. Now scientists think that the brain works in a decentralized fashion without any central clock, and understanding how that works is of great interest.
It’s almost Einsteinian: in the brain, there is no universal time, only local time.
The book is also a narrative; it’s the story of a man – me – who’s trying to change his relationship to time. My last book (Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion) took me almost 10 years to write, and I vowed that my next book would be finished on time. So as I go along interviewing scientists and visiting time labs, I’ll also interview and consult time managers and coaches to help me address my time issues, organize myself, and finish the book on deadline, and I’ll make the process transparent to the reader. Basically, it’ll be a book about time, written on time, and, I hope, the story of how I did it.
My undergraduate degree is in history and philosophy of science. In a broad sense, both this book and the last one grew from some of the ideas I kicked around as an undergrad. How do scientists come to know the world? How do they go about transforming raw data into knowledge, into facts? Both books are also concerned with epistemological, and ultimately very personal, questions: What is nature? What is time? And why do we perceive them as we do?
