Customer Reviews

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

If you want to know how your brain works but have no desire to read a scientific treatise on the subject, then this book is for you. The premise is refined and beckoning. The name Proust in the title encouraged me to pick up the book, but perusing the jacket had me hooked. Artists as scientific validation? I had to find out how these two seemingly unique areas could be so intertwined. Reading each chapter, one must savor the full experience of what the author has written. I found taking a break between each new chapter revelation enabled me to reflect and find similar thoughts and discoveries in my own life and thoughts. This prepares you for the next disclosure. For the artist, reader and budding hedonist in you - this book will bring them all together.

I have read numerous reviews of this book, and was afraid that it would be too difficult to understand, given the title and subject matter. I was surprised to find it clearly written and definitely accessible, even without a background in either art or science. I especially enjoyed the discussion of neuroscience advances in memory research. My favorite chapter was about the chef, Escoffier. It makes sense that chefs would discover how to manipulate our taste buds long before scientists could explain why something tastes so good.

Proust was a Neuroscientist is creative and original, and helped me think about the relationship between science and art in a new way. I recommend it.

It is not surprising at all to hear that artistic musings can predate and even validate scientific theories and observations sometimes by several decades. And since it is ultimately the senses and the brain that allow the appreciation of art and music, it is natural that artists and musicians, even if they know nothing of contemporary cognitive neuroscience, would be able to create works that would exploit both the power and limitations of the senses and the brain. This book, elegantly written but far too short for those who are captivated by its contents and are greedy for more, gives some examples of this. Indeed, composers, authors, chefs, and artists such as Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Igor Stravinsky, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Paul Cezanne all showed great insight into brain function the author argues, and it was this insight, although they may not have explicitly acknowledged it, that enabled them to have such an impact. This impact was sometimes delayed as far as social recognition was concerned, but if examined in the light of modern research in cognitive neuroscience, their contributions take on a whole new meaning, and one that goes beyond how they affected the individual reader or listener. The author's contributions in this book can be viewed somewhat loosely in the context of what might be called `neurocriticism', or `neuro-humanities'. The goal of these disciplines (not really recognized "officially" by academia) is to interpret literature, art, science, and other categories in light of what is now understood about the science of the brain. This is a fascinating approach to the understanding of these categories, and one that is gaining momentum as better experimental techniques are discovered for studying brain processes. And such an approach will also assist in bringing together, or maybe even setting apart in a way that is justified by neuroscience, the sciences and the humanities. The author ends the book longing for recognition of the arts as a legitimate mode of cognition; one that can offer paths to knowledge and insights that science may not be able at first to traverse. But with scientific studies of consciousness gaining credibility, and with phenomena such as synaesthesia being taken seriously by the scientific community, the author has no cause to worry. It is the brain that holds the key to the sciences and the humanities, and if it brings them together this will be fine for both artist and scientist. If it sets them apart, one can delight in the toggling between one and the other, engaging maybe in a temporary riot of mental cognition, much the same as what Stravinsky's audience did as detailed in this book. Either alternative is awesome.

I found this book disappointing. It initially appeared to be a consideration of the interaction between the arts and sciences and how the two fields complemented or contributed to one another. Instead it presents a group of artists who apparently had ideas about the mind, the brain, how we sense things, who we are as humans and contrasts these ideas with prevalent scientific ideas at the time. Since the artists' ideas were new and untested scientifically, they were frequently dismissed by some scientists. The conclusion - science was blind to the brilliant new ideas of artists, frequently willfully so.

There are several things that bother me about this book. The author necessarily simplifies the science he discusses, primarily neuroscience, frequently to the point of being inaccurate and several times incorrect. Given that, it made me wonder how often the ideas of the artists were portrayed inaccurately, or incorrectly. I found it difficult to trust in what was written about the arts and artists.

The author tends to make the scientific culture monolithic and unyielding. There are certainly scientists who are rigid and arrogant in their thinking, but many (most) who understand that what is known today will be modified extensively tomorrow. Even though he worked for a time in an outstanding neuroscience lab, the author does not seem to have a good grasp of the scientific method. While he clearly trumpets its limitations, it is not in the context of understanding the method itself.

The adjective and verbs applied to science are frequently negative, signaling who is wrong and who is right before the discussion begins. Terms such as inane, fashionable obsession, ransacked, derision, typically stubborn are applied to science or scientists and not to artists. How do you trust someone who biases the argument from the beginning?

It appears a major theme in this book is an argument against science as religion - the belief in the untestable hypothesis that science will ultimately be able to explain everything humans do and think and feel on a molecular basis. It is an important argument to make but the way the book is written, the author is preaching to the choir and is not going to convince anyone who holds the opposite belief or, more importantly, is not sure.

I give the author credit for being thought provoking and interesting. I just wish he would have written a balanced discussion so in the end he would be believable. I thought it was ironic that in the last chapter (Coda), he writes about the idea and failure of a third milieu in which the arts and the sciences could engage in a cross-dialog and draw from each other, and he then criticizes those who took this idea and used it as a prop for a rigid defense of the ultimate triumph of science over all. The irony is that the criticism he levies against the science writers, while accurate, could be used against him from the opposite angle for the entirety of this book. Frustrating.

I bought this book on a whim after hearing about it on NPR. Bad idea. Should have looked at the sample pages here first. The introduction mentions that the author is a well-known blogger. I haven't read his blog, but it's an interesting coincidence for me. About a month ago I bought a couple of books by another popular blogger whose stuff I did read and really liked. The books were a huge disappointment. Not surprisingly, transition from blog to paper is not that easy. I thought it was really strange that on the jacket there was a blurb from Oliver Sacks, whose books I like.

Be that as it may, this book is an excellent example of bad pop science. First, I read the chapter on Stravinsky and it became clear that there was little substance behind the catchy title of this book. Concerning Stravinsky, there are some interesting anecdotes about him and the history of the Rite of Spring, random bits and pieces of music theory and physiology, a brief excursion into The State by Plato, a quote from Nietzsche. The idea of this chapter, as far as I understand it, is to explain that avant-garde takes some getting used to, like all new things -- a shocking fact supported by modern neurological research. Why did the author choose Stravinsky and not Skryabin or Schoenberg or Cage or Stockhausen? Who knows. I think they would do just as well, or just as poorly. It's also annoying when he casually drops technical terms without understanding what they mean, e.g. when he writes that positive feedback creates white noise. But the main problem, of course, is that the premise is very far-fetched. That is not to say that there is not or cannot be a connection between art and science, but I just think it has to be a lot more interesting than what's described in this book.

Then I read a couple more chapters when I was bored, and, alas, the connection between neuroscience and the arts did not become any clearer. The same mixture of opinions and questionable facts everywhere, which can be fun to read until the author starts drawing bridges and showing the big picture in every chapter. But I'm really glad I picked up the book after all, because there is a reference to Michael Gazzaniga's research (among hundreds of other cherry-picked quotes and references), and this reminded me to finish reading his book The Social Brain. If you're casually interested in neuroscience, your time will be much better spent reading that. I would also recommend The Brain: a Beginner's Guide by Al-Chalabi, Turner and Delamont. And I took Proust Was a Neuroscientist to a used book store and got a few dollars for it, although the right thing to do would be to throw it into a recycle bin. And when (and if) I read another volume of In Search of Lost Time by a certain neuroscientist, I will also remember Lehrer's book.

I read this book several weeks ago and originally had decided not to publish a review. However, as of my writing this, Lehrer is getting a little too beat up for my tastes - and undeservedly so. First, Lehrer is a smart guy. He is a Rhodes Scholar and he didn't just work in any old lab; he worked in Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel's (In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind) lab. Second, this is not a bad book, if you judge it for what it is.

There is a long standing feud between the Sciences and the Humanities. This feud was what inspired E. O. Wilson to write Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Another good book that covers this dichotomy is Human Nature: Fact And Fiction - Literature, Science And Human Nature. Bridging this gap is difficult to do, and with that as Lehrer's goal, I think he does a fine job. I don't actually believe in Lehrer's `heart-of-hearts' that he truly believes "Proust WAS a neuroscientist", he is simply trying his best to speak allegorically. The same is true for everyone in the book: 1) Walt Whitman - The Substance of Feeling, 2) George Eliot - The Biology of Freedom, 3) Auguste Escoffier - The Essence of Taste, 4) Marcel Proust - The Method of Memory, 5) Paul Cezanne - The Process of Sight, 6) Igor Stravinsky - The Source of Music, 7) Gertrude Stein - The Structure of Language and 8) Virginia Woolf - The Emergent Self.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed this book and have recommended it to others. There are indeed many things that Lehrer nails down tight and gets absolutely right. You could read either Brainstorming: Views and Interviews on the Mind or Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions to see that this is so. His writing style is elegant and well-dressed. Lastly, I preferred this book to his newest one How We Decide, although they are quite different.

Mr. Lehrer had an idea - a number of writers and other artists were prophetic of the findings of modern neuroscience. This book represents his attempt to support that idea by the classic mode of cherry-picking. It proves that if one looks long and hard enough, some sort of prediction of almost anything can be wrung out of 19th and early 20th century writing or productions, whether artistic or gastronomic. Equally disquieting is the author's poor grasp of science. Consider a few of the bloopers which appear in the chapter on George Eliot. In describing Eliot's attraction to Darwin, Lehrer writes, "Here was a narrative that was itself unknowable, since it was guided by random variation. The evolution of life depended on events that had no discernible cause." Poor Darwin may be rolling over in his grave. Although I wince at the use of the word "guided" at all with respect to evolution, if used it might be vaguely associated with natural selection, not random variation. And any number of (but certainly not all) causes of natural selection have been well documented. Further on Lehrer states, "Scientific facts are meaningful precisely because they are ephemeral, because a new observation, a more honest observation, can always alter them." With this the author's purported background in science further tanks. Facts remain facts even if their interpretation changes as new hypotheses are developed to explain the new observations. Presuming that the earlier data were "honestly" collected, to be accepted the new hypothesis must also explain these older data or show that something about them makes them insufficient or not germane. And what exactly is a more honest observation? Is Lehrer impugning Newton because his data did not allow him to anticipate quantum theory?
Overall, this is a well written book with a lame thesis and containing numerous statements that will raise the hair on the back of the neck of anyone who understands science and how it is done. It illustrates that post-Modernism is alive but not well.