Beginning with the claim that we are psychologically alive only in the now, readers are invited to reconsider their day-to-day experiences. Certain moments of shared immediate experience—such as a knowing glance across a dinner table—are paradigmatic of what Stern shows to be the core of human experience, the three to five seconds he identifies as "the present moment." This book offers a novel response to age-old questions about the passage of time, what the future offers, and how humans change during the course of their lives.