Proust Was A Neuroscientist
Proust Was A Neuroscientist
Science and art have long been at each other’s throats. Scientists declare that all life can be reduced to its fundamentals and, in so doing, be understood; while artists are adamant that the only way to approach an understanding of life is to analyze it creatively through the lens of an artistic medium rather than a microscope.
In his first book, Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer argues compellingly for an ultimate truce between the two sides of this debate. His method is simple; with the subject of neuroscience as a battleground, he one-ups science over and over using a variety of artists and their own innovative discoveries about the mind. Lehrer claims that science shouldn’t be too quick to judge art and its merits, when, in the case of neuroscience, artists have intuited certain truths about the brain and its workings that scientists only discovered and made concrete years afterward.
Lehrer is well qualified to make this argument. A double-major in Neuroscience and English from Columbia University and a Rhodes Scholar, Lehrer embodies the intersection of art and science. He also has extensive experience on both sides of the fence. He has worked in the lab of neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, has studied with British literary critic Hermione Lee at Oxford, and has worked as a chef in Le Bernardin, a famous French restaurant in New York. Proust was a Neuroscientist is the culmination of Lehrer’s experiences. His multiplicity of interests and talents make his voice singular and authoritative.
First and foremost, Proust was a Neuroscientist is very accessible. Weighing in at fewer than two hundred pages, the book is clearly written with the curious but amateur reader in mind. He draws upon an impressive bibliography of literature and scientific papers, collecting the most important details and translating them for the lay reader.
Lehrer’s book is part biography and part philosophy. He provides fascinating anecdotes that look into the lives of famous artists and their unique artistic journeys while chronicling some of the latest achievements and newsmakers in the field of neuroscience.
It deals, in turn, with writers, a chef, a painter, a poet, and a pianist, dissecting their artistic achievements and simultaneous neurological discoveries. Virginia Woolf, a novelist known for her stream of consciousness work Mrs. Dalloway, was constantly afflicted by psychological disorders. She became obsessed with introspection, spending her time between afflictions writing her thoughts on the mind and self. She discovered that there is a “self” which binds the actions, the impulses, the myriad thoughts, to a conscious purpose. Sensations that explode throughout the mind all influence and are influenced by this “self.” As Lehrer describes, this abstraction has been lately being accepted by a growing number of neuroscientists who cannot as yet get past the ultimate question of how the brain creates the mind.
Another case study, Paul Cézanne, was able to faithfully reproduce life as it appears before interpretation by the visual cortex decades ahead of neurological studies on the topic. Auguste Escoffier, chef extraordinaire, realized the existence of a fifth taste (apart from traditional sour, sweet, salty, and bitter) now dubbed ‘umami’ by neuroscientists, which is derived from reduced meat stock. He never stopped extolling the virtue and necessity of this taste and based nearly all of his recipes upon it.
The impetus for this book, and the most fascinating case study, is that of author Marcel Proust. In his sprawling masterpiece of introspection, In Search of Lost Time, Proust came to the conclusion of the mutability of memory and the emotional connotations of smell and taste long before neuroscientists proved them experimentally. His recollections begin with the tasting of a cake, a madeleine, which throws his mind into an acute state of nostalgia, flooding him with recollections of his childhood. What follows is a profound exercise in memory where Proust describes semi-autobiographical experiences. He discovers though, that his memories are neither quite accurate nor truthful representations of the past, and that they change, ever so slightly, with every remembrance. Neuroscience has since discovered that every subsequent remembrance changes the neuronal associations that originally held the memory. Thus, Lehrer declares, “our memories…are fiction” written and rewritten by the act of remembrance.
Lehrer’s writing is a pleasurable blend of art and science. He simplifies difficult and abstract neurological concepts into rich and creative prose. At the same time, he describes analogous artistic discoveries convincingly, which serve to make his claims all the more persuasive. In this respect, perhaps, Lehrer makes his most effective argument: his writing is a testament to the marriage of art and science. Bursting from every page are lucid, at times poetic, explanations, clarifications, and analogies that serve to carry the reader through Lehrer’s profound and often exciting reasoning. DNA is described as nature’s “astonishingly complicated prose” while the scientists who denied the existence of a possible fifth taste are reduced to “haughty lab coats.” Pre-Chomskian linguists are no more than “verbal botanists” who were “content with classification and observation” and the Central Dogma of biology views humans simply as “elaborate sculptures of protein.”
The reader is left with more questions than answers, which is precisely the goal of this book. It is the kind of book one will to return to afterward in order to meditate on its ideas. This book will set your neurons ablaze with possibility.
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