IN SEARCH OF NOW

How is it that the most familiar thing in the world—the present moment, this one, right now—is also the most mysterious to science?

According to Marchant, a science journalist and author (Decoding the Heavens, 2009), it’s because science needs a new “Now-centered” perspective. The old one goes back to ancient Greece, when Parmenides argued for an unchanging cosmos even as Heraclitus insisted that we can’t step into the same moment twice. Things swung in Parmenides’ favor when Einstein showed that past, present, and future exist all at once. If the universe can’t single out a Now, perhaps we construct it in our minds. “A gap was opening,” Marchant writes, “between what we perceive in each moment, and how the world beyond us unfolds.” The book explores both sides of that gap—the physics of time and the neuroscience of time perception. Sufferers of “akinetopsia,” a neurological condition, perceive reality as if someone’s hit pause; “marooned in a world of frozen moments,” a woman tries to pour her tea but it forms “a static, suspended column, stretching from spout to cup.” For schizophrenics, time fragments, as does the self. “Perhaps that’s what our sense of self is,” Marchant writes: our ability to draw from the past and think toward the future. In epileptic seizures, “flow” states, and meditation, we more fully occupy the Now, loosening the distinction between self and world. The gap narrows. By the end of the book, Marchant hopes to close it, drawing from radical ideas in cognitive science and quantum physics. Here things get a bit confused. While explaining the enactive approach to cognition, Marchant speaks of the brain’s need to make inferences, missing the point that, for enactivists, the mind isn’t locked in the head. Her attempt to link the mutually contradictory theories of enactivism, integrated information theory, and predictive coding into a “unifying framework” is ultimately incoherent. Still, this ambitious and beautifully written book gestures at something truly profound: a new view of science in which “nothing is set in stone: we have a say in what the universe is and where it goes.”

An enlightening if stumbling attempt to grasp the slippery instant where mind and universe collide.