11 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
J.W. Dunne's 1927 book arguing that dreams give access to future events (precognitive dreams occur regularly but are forgotten on waking) and proposing serial time theory as the metaphysical framework that explains this without violating causality.
Oliver Burkeman's 2021 philosophical argument — that the average human life is 4,000 weeks, that the belief you can get everything done is an avoidance of this reality, and that embracing finitude rather than optimizing against it is the path to meaningful life.
American psychologist — UCLA Anderson School of Management — author of Your Future Self — who studies the psychology of future self-continuity and its implications for long-term decision-making.
French philosopher — Nobel Prize in Literature (1927) — author of Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution — who argued that reality is fundamentally temporal, that intuition is superior to intellect for grasping duration, and that life is animated by an élan vital.
British aeronautical engineer who wrote An Experiment with Time (1927) — arguing that dreams give access to future events (precognitive dreams) and that time has a serial structure (time 1, time 2, etc.) that accounts for precognition — one of the most widely read books on time and dreams in the 20th century.
French novelist who wrote In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) — the longest novel in world literature — a seven-volume meditation on memory, time, social class, and artistic vocation centered on the narrator's effort to recover the past through involuntary memory.
American journalist — former Washington Bureau Chief of TIME — co-author with Nancy Gibbs of The Presidents Club (on the relationships between living former presidents) and The Preacher and the Presidents.
American journalist — Managing Editor of TIME magazine (2013–2017) — who became the first woman to lead TIME — Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center director — author of The Preacher and the Presidents (on Billy Graham's relationships with all US presidents).
German science journalist — author of The Secret Pulse of Time and The Science of Happiness — who writes popular science on subjective experience, physics, and consciousness.
Stefan Klein's 2007 exploration of the science of subjective time — examining why time speeds up with age, slows in danger, and varies with attention — synthesizing physics, psychology, and neuroscience.
Hal Hershfield's 2023 guide to connecting with your future self — synthesizing temporal psychology research to help readers make better long-term decisions by developing a more vivid relationship with who they will become.