Proust Was a Neuroscientist [Paperback]

Jonah Lehrer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0547085907 | ISBN-13: 978-0547085906 | Edition: Reprint

In this technology-driven age, it’s tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, when it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first.
Taking a group of artists — a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists — Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain’s malleability; how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language — a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. It’s the ultimate tale of art trumping science.
More broadly, Lehrer shows that there’s a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and art knows this better than science does. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate science writing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science and art to listen more closely to each other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Significant Seven, December 2007: Proust may have been more neurasthenic than neuroscientist, but Jonah Lehrer argues in Proust Was a Neuroscientist that he (and many of his fellow artists) made discoveries about the brain that it took science decades to catch up with (in Proust's case, that memory is a process, not a repository). Lehrer weaves back and forth between art and science in eight graceful portraits of artists (mostly writers, along with a chef, a painter, and a composer) who understood, better at times than atomizing scientists, that truth can begin with "what reality feels like." Sometimes it's the art that's most evocative in his tales, sometimes the science: Lehrer writes about them with equal ease and clarity, and with a youthful confidence that art and science, long divided, may yet be reconciled. --Tom Nissley --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

With impressively clear prose, Lehrer explores the oft-overlooked places in literary history where novelists, poets and the occasional cookbook writer predicted scientific breakthroughs with their artistic insights. The 25-year-old Columbia graduate draws from his diverse background in lab work, science writing and fine cuisine to explain how Cézanne anticipated breakthroughs in the understanding of human sight, how Walt Whitman intuited the biological basis of thoughts and, in the title essay, how Proust penetrated the mysteries of memory by immersing himself in childhood recollections. Lehrer's writing peaks in the essay about Auguste Escoffier, the chef who essentially invented modern French cooking. The author's obvious zeal for the subject of food preparation leads him into enjoyable discussions of the creation of MSG and the decidedly unappetizing history of 18th- and 19th-century culinary arts. Occasionally, the science prose risks becoming exceedingly dry (as in the enthusiastic section detailing the work of Lehrer's former employer, neuroscientist Kausik Si), but the hard science is usually tempered by Lehrer's deft way with anecdote and example. Most importantly, this collection comes close to exemplifying Lehrer's stated goal of creating a unified third culture in which science and literature can co-exist as peaceful, complementary equals. 21 b&w illus. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; Reprint edition (September 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0547085907
• ISBN-13: 978-0547085906
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (78 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #47,529 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jonah Lehrer is a Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. He graduated from Columbia University and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He's written for The New Yorker, Nature, Seed, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. He's also a Contributing Editor at Scientific American Mind and National Public Radio's Radio Lab.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

436 of 510 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars No, he wasn't. January 23, 2008

By B. Perry

Format:Hardcover

When I first heard of this book, I was intrigued by the title. I just recently finished Proust's In Search of Lost Time and I've spent a good part of my career in Neuroscience. So I laughed when I saw the madeleine, the initiator of Marcel's journey of memory, on the cover. But I'm sorry to report that this is a most irritating book. Mr. Lehrer sets up his premise that these eight great artists somehow presaged later discoveries of neuroscience and then bends over backwards to prove it. Each artist/novelist/cook is subjected to egregious cherry-picking of quotes and concepts to align their work with his shallow understanding of neuro-scientific discoveries (his scientific credentials are that he worked in a neuroscience lab as a technician). He covers a lot of ground but it is at a desperate, grad-student level of scholarship. This is confirmed in his acknowledgement section where he admits to having spent a lot of time in the library - probably reading other authors' analyses of these artists. Too bad he didn't study them himself. The book is at its best when he is simply reviewing the contributions made by these giants. Their works are described enthusiastically though not thoroughly. It's like examining the Sistine Chapel with a flashlight - he misses the big picture. But when he reduces the artist's entire body of work down to fit his argument that they somehow anticipated how the brain functions, things really fall apart. Concerning the ones I know well (Proust, Cezanne, Stravinsky, and Woolf), I was startled by how idiotic his extrapolations are. No, Proust was not a neuroscientist. He was a brilliant writer who described the human condition and human behavior like no other. It's insulting to reduce his literary adventure of memory to a discussion of dendritic prions. Had he read the scene from 'Time Regained' where Marcel waits in the library, he'd know that. It is the best statement of Proust's understanding of the power of memory - and it's not mentioned in this book. The 'analysis' in this book is agenda-driven musings of a 25-year-old blogger. After eight chapters of this intellectual alchemy, his conclusion describes the artistic and scientific cultures as dysfunctional children who need to appreciate one another better ("Every humanist should read Nature." What?!) Art and Science are both important tools for exploring our world and ourselves. All human beings have the option to learn, appreciate, and participate in both. They are complementary, not mutually exclusive. But they are best appreciated within their own domain - and not force-fit into the other.

68 of 80 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Dilettante cherry-picking expedition January 19, 2009

By Zetetic

Format:Paperback

I agree with the reviewer who noted that it is far more impressive when careful research and incisive analysis arrive at a good idea in lieu of cobbling together disjointed fragments to support a hunch. Overall, I'd say this book reads like a well written high school essay boasting a farrago of flimsy, contrived connections that might make for some fun dilettante coffee talk but crumble when a little bit of logic and critical thinking are applied. This author is certainly very intelligent, but after stripping away the elegant verbal paint job applied to this book, I found the content to be absolutely dreadful. I hope that Lehrer's research capabilities and critical thinking skills will one day catch up with his solid writing ability.

56 of 66 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Lehrer's novel was only half right. October 20, 2008

By Jared Ivey

Format:Paperback

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer attempts to reveal ideas from artists about the mind that neuroscience is recently discovering as true. Lehrer explains both the artistic and scientific concepts in such a way that anyone could understand. This novel is not a hardcore lesson in neuroscience or art but instead a decent blend of both fields.

The different chapters look at a poet, four novelists, a chef, a painter, and a composer. The chapters each follow similar patterns. Lehrer initially prepares us for each artist with a brief biography at the beginning. He then delves into certain works and exposes the neurological insights of the artists. Once we understand the artist's view on the mind, Lehrer shifts from art to science to show discoveries in neuroscience that pertain to the artist's ideas. Finally, Lehrer attempts to draw similarities between what the artist believed and what neuroscience has discovered.

The book first examines the poet Walt Whitman, who saw the mind and body as inseparable. George Eliot, the novelist who believed human freedom arose from our mind's malleability, comes next. The French chef Auguste Escoffier did wonders for the culinary arts with his ideas on the plasticity of taste, the power of suggestion, and the importance of our sense of smell in tasting food. Marcel Proust uncovered the role of smell and taste in our memories as well as the memory's fallibility. Paul Cezanne used his paintings to show that our perception plays a huge role in what and how we see the world around us. The composer Igor Stravinsky revealed that we can only begin to feel music when "the pattern we imagine starts to break down" (Lehrer 132). Gertrude Stein demonstrated that language did not necessarily have to make sense so long as the structure of the grammar remained intact. Lehrer finishes the novel with a chapter about Virginia Woolf, who dug deep into herself in an attempt to discover the source of our "self."

Walt Whitman
"This is the moral of Whitman's poetic sprawl: the human being is an irreducible whole" (Lehrer 5). Before and during Whitman's time, the common belief was that the body and spirit were two separate entities. Lehrer supplements Whitman's idea that our feelings are due to interactions between the mind and body by citing the work of Antonio Damasio. Damasio used four decks of cards where two decks contained big payouts and even bigger punishments and the other two decks had smaller payouts and very few punishments. He tested the electrical conductance of a test subject's palms and found that the subject's hand would get "nervous" just reaching toward the negative decks, long before the subject's mind understood.

George Eliot
I could not quite understand what Lehrer was getting at with this chapter. He mentions Eliot's idea that our ability to change ourselves gives us an innate freedom and then goes into details about neurogenesis and the fact that DNA does not determine our brains; however, the topics do not seem to really blend well. Steps following protein transcription from RNA involve plenty of changes that DNA does not determine, and the environment around any organism plays a huge role in how it behaves. I just could not find the connection between freedoms built into us with the neuroscience Lehrer chose to include.

Auguste Escoffier
Lehrer redeemed himself with this chapter. Escoffier's discovery of umami before it was scientifically investigated as well as his understanding of smell's involvement in taste and the power of suggestion made this chapter much more interesting to read than the previous Eliot chapter. Two studies, one on cheap red wine and the other on white wine with red food coloring, revealed what had to be an embarrassing truth about the power of suggestion to a decent number of wine experts.

Marcel Proust
Proust's thoughts on the memory meshed well with the discoveries in neuroscience. His verbose recollection of eating a madeleine and the memories that sprang from it match perfectly with the smell and taste "connect directly to the hippocampus, the center of the brain's long-term memory" (Lehrer 80). The fallibility of memory that Proust realized is another intriguing aspect of neuroscience, the idea that we can "remember" something without actually experiencing it or the notion that "we have to misremember something in order to remember it" (Lehrer 89).

Paul Cezanne
"Cezanne's epiphany was that our impressions require interpretation; to look is to create what you see" (Lehrer 97). Perception is such a huge part of our senses; Cezanne used his paintings to show us that we can use our minds to complete the picture. Lehrer's inclusion of two of Cezanne's paintings helped to supplement this idea. "His art shows us what we cannot see, which is how we see" (Lehrer 104). Lehrer could have completely skipped connecting Cezanne to neuroscience; the pictures speak for themselves.

Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf
After building up his evidence so well with the chapters on Escoffier, Proust, and Cezanne, Lehrer unfortunately began to lose me again with these last three chapters. Stravinsky "knew" that people's plastic brains could be taught to enjoy and feel new music, although the same could be said for Elvis Presley, Madonna, or any of the other breakthrough musical artists. Gertrude Stein attempted to show that the structure of language is built into us by making words meaningless. Lehrer made a good point that statistics could not truly determine the words in a sentence, as shown through some of Stein's improbably sentences, but the good points end there in that chapter. Virginia Woolf's ideas about the self were intriguing but lacked the connection to neuroscience that some of the other chapters possessed.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist was an interesting recreational read. The points where art and science blended seamlessly easily kept my attention; however, certain chapters lost the connection between the fields, and the book as a whole did not delve into neuroscience as much as I had hoped.