Proust Was a Neuroscientist » (Reprint)

Jonah Lehrer is editor at large for Seed magazine and the author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist (2007) and How We Decide (February 2009). A graduate of Columbia University and a Rhodes Scholar, Lehrer has worked in the lab of Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel and has written for the New Yorker, Wired, Boston Globe, Washington Post, and Nature, and writes a highly regarded blog, The Frontal Cortex. Lehrer also commentates for NPR's Radio Lab.

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.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Two venerable and interconnected philosophical problems permeate Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer -- a fascinating, succinct (197-page), if sometimes over-ambitious examination of the ways in which the work of Walt Whitman, Paul Cézanne, Igor Stravinsky, and five other artists anticipated some modern discoveries about the brain. Those two problems are the mystery of the conscious self -- how and why it is we are aware of our own being in the world -- and the question of free will.

Prelude ix

1. Walt Whitman The Substance of Feeling 1

2. George Eliot The Biology of Freedom 25

3. Auguste Escoffier The Essence of Taste 53

4. Marcel Proust The Method of Memory 75

5. Paul Cézanne The Process of Sight 96

6. Igor Stravinsky The Source of Music 120

7. Gertrude Stein The Structure of Language 144

8. Virginia Woolf The Emergent Self 168

Coda 190

Acknowledgments 199

Notes 201

Bibliography 216

Index 231