The present has a special status for us humans – our past seems to no longer exists, and our future is yet to come into existence. But according to how physicists and philosophers interpret Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the present isn’t at all special. The past and the future are just as real as the present - they all coexist and you could, theoretically, travel to them. But, argues Dean Buonomano, this interpretation of Einstein’s theory might have more to do with the way our brains evolved to think of time in a similar way to space, than with the nature of time.

The human brain is an astonishingly powerful information processing device. It transforms the blooming buzzing confusion of raw data that impinges on our sensory organs into a compelling model of the external world. It endows us with language, rationality, and symbolic reasoning, and most mysteriously, it bestows us with consciousness (more precisely it bestows itself with consciousness). But, on the other hand, the brain is also a rather feeble and buggy information processing device. When it comes to mental numerical calculations the most complex device in the known universe is embarrassingly inept. The brain has a hodge-podge of cognitive biases that often lead to irrational decisions. And when it comes to understanding the nature of the universe, we should remember that the human brain was optimized to survive and reproduce in an environment we outgrew long ago, not decipher the laws of nature.