Ever since Einstein, physicists have been telling us that time – this steady tick-tock of the universe – is much weirder than we think. It doesn’t flow in a single, linear direction, or beat like a steady metronome. (Eagleman is also a best-selling novelist –Sumis a brilliant riff on the possibility of an afterlife. “We asked everyone how scary it was, on a scale from 1 to 10,” he reports, “and everyone said 10.” And all of the subjects reported a slow-motion effect while falling: they consistently over-estimated the time it took to fall.