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.
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