Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Written by Jonah Lehrer

Narrated by Dan John Miller

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 identified 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 this is what art knows better than science. 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Sep 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781423374244

Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrer is a writer, journalist, and the author of Mystery, A Book About Love, 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, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Reviews for Proust Was a Neuroscientist

[tbeck-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In Proust was a Neuroscientist, Lehrer examines the art of eight Modernist figureheads and the connections between their artistic endeavors and what neuroscientists are now learning about the human brain. While it is evident that the connections between Proust and neuroscience were foremost in Lehrer's conception of this book, the connections between neuroscience and each of the other featured artists is clear and - while not groundbreaking - very interesting and insightful.

The importance of this work lies in the Coda, where Lehrer uses these forged connections to weave a convincing argument for a "fourth culture" in which there exists intersection between science and art with each discipline standing on equal footing for the common goal of exploring a shared human experience.

That said, a major criticism of this book is that it is primarily a work of Modernism - ignoring and at times taking unfair jabs against Postmodern notions that have been explored in the half-century between the artists' time and the book's publication.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lehrer argues that many 20th and 21st-century discoveries of neuroscience are actually re-discoveries of insights made earlier by various artists, including Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, Paul Cézanne, Igor Stravinsky, and, as mentioned in the title, Marcel Proust. It is really an exploration into the old Science vs. Art debate. As such it has some refreshing and thought-provoking ideas, although they are somewhat speculative. Lehrer takes the reader into the dusty corners of literary history, pondering over the musings of poets, writers, artists and composers in order to prove his theory – not just that Proust was a neuroscientist, but that artists are the innovative crowd in matters of science and, in particular, the human brain. Leher argues that it is through the boundless freedom at the heart of these artists’ work, that they have uncovered truths about science before the scientists themselves have had a chance to catch up. The artistic hypothesis which forms the foundation of the work of these creative thinkers is based on ‘measuring the immeasurable’. They attempt it by treating their art as a living entity – exploring the ‘anatomy of emotion’ rather than treating their art as pure surface matter. In this fascinating and unusual book, Lehrer makes an insightful case for Art triumphing over Science, selecting visionary thinkers to illustrate his very valid points. Whether this speculation holds any water is something else. Even if it does not the book presents an interesting hypothesis and is enjoyable to read.

[eoin-311239 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Artists predicting 20th century neuroscience. Another book whose audience I can not imagine. There is not really enough information about the artists for someone who didn't already know them and the science is basic to the point of misleadingly simple. Could have been deeper in both aspects, though it was worth it for the thumbnail sketch of L-glutamate.

[thedivineoomba · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a book that links neuroscience/how the brain works to artists (poets, fiction, painters, composers, etc). And it kind of succeeds. Each chapter portrayed a different artist (with mentions of other people in that movement). Sometimes it makes sense, the language that Walt Whitman uses (I feel with my whole body) is where current neuroscience has shown, where during Whitman's time, it was thought that only the brain matters. This is the strongest chapter in the book.The chapter on Igor Stravinsky, while very interesting in itself, is basically about how the brain predicts music it is hearing, so when it encounters something different, it hears it as bad, or awful. Unlike Whitman who was making connections about how a person feels emotion in his poetry, Stravinsky wasn't out to test a theory about music. He just wanted to write something different. And that is the case with many of authors selected - they might have created a different way of doing something, but it was no different than the guy who creates a new recipe with unusual ingredients, or the person who wrote the first computer operating system.However, the book is interesting in the people that is highlighted - names I've heard about, but didn't know why they were important (Gertrude Stein) the biography and what they did was well done - I learned a bit, and enjoyed these sections. It was when these people's accomplishments were compared to what has been discovered in neuroscience, the connection was weak and at times, a bit of an eye roll.

[lritchie1150 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is one of the more thoughtful explorations of neuroscience I have read, and a refreshingly positive exploration of our ability as humans to know and understand our true natures through artistic self exploration. It actually made me want to read Walt Whitman, and I've been ducking that since university. For musicians, the essay on Stravinsky and the process by which we understand and enjoy music was particularly enlightening and also helps explain why I find no enjoyment in modern country music.

[jimocracy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

To examine neuroscience through the lens of the culinary arts, literary arts, music composition, artistic creativity, et cetera, was pure genius. At first, I didn't understand why the author was jumping around from topic to topic. But after a few chapters, it was clear that he intended to describe how our brains work by explaining how each of the senses collects and processes what we see, hear, taste, feel, and smell. This book was tedious in places but well worth reading!

[epersonae_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An intriguing collection of essays on 19th & 20th century artists & writers and their connections to (or foreshadowing of) psychology and neuroscience. Fascinating both for the personal histories and for the science. What's stuck with me is both the weirdness of perception and the malleability of the brain. FWIW, that second bit actually brings me a lot of hope and comfort.

Even as a writer, I got annoyed after a while with the touches of "oh some things can never be explained" (I'm paraphrasing badly) bits. Felt a bit hand-wavey.

Still, quite interesting.

[shelley436 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Each chapter of this book focuses on a different historical person from arts who presaged one or more ideas about the mind that would later be confirmed by neuroscientists. Several chapters are standouts. While I had been exposed to most of the ideas before, it was enlightening to look at them with both the eyes of an artist and the eyes of a scientist at the same time. This made the experience very insightful.

[othemts · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

his book explores the work of eight artists and how their art revealed truths about the human brain that would later be discovered through science. A quick search of Google brings up several reviews that dismiss Lehrer's work as "popular science" but I think they're missing the point that readers can learn scientific concepts through an artistic lens. Of course, with my humanities background I'm biased to the idea that the arts have something to offer to scientific study. The artists include Walt Whitman (feeling), George Eliot (malleability of the brain), Auguste Escoffier (taste), Marcel Proust (memory), Paul Cezane (vision), Igor Stravinsky (music), Gertrude Stein (language), and Virginia Woolf (self). The conclusion of the book is an appeal to end the artificial divide between arts and sciences that I strongly support.Favorite Passages:

"Nature, however, writes astonishingly complicated prose. If our DNA has a literary equivalent, it’s Finnegan’s Wake."

[birdy55 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

great book. Gave copy to my neurologist.

[cajela_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed every separate chapter of this book. It's a series of essays, each of which explores the work of an artist, and how his or her work anticipated some scientific discovery on the nature of the mind and our perceptions. We have, among others, Whitman on the embodiedness of the mind and emotion; Escoffier anticipating the discovery of umami; Cezanne exploring sight; Stein exploring language; and of course, Proust on memory. Each chapter shares the same theme: the art, and then the science that later confirms that the artist's insight was correct. Lehrer makes a strong case for the role of art in exploring and communicating the subjectivity of human experience. But what I found very odd is that his framing discussion contradicts his essays. He seems to be drawing out a lesson that Art can teach us things that Science Can Not Know. But in each case, he has quite explicitly spelled out the science that actually *does* know, as a demonstration than his chosen artists were right. Wait, what? There's also an uncomfortable cherry picking feel to it. With enough artists exploring in enough directions, somebody's bound to be aiming the right way. In the chapter on Cezanne, Lehrer discusses Cezanne's friend Zola, whose art reflected a theme of genetic determinism which time has not been kind to... so if the science had come out the other way, perhaps Zola might have been his featured artist?

[niecierpek · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The profound understanding of human nature we feel good art shows is officially not an illusion. Lehrer discusses the intimations great artists had about the nature of the brain, consciousness, perception, and senses that have been confirmed by recent scientific research. In particular, he chooses a few great writers, a painter, a composer, and a chef and shows how their insights proved to be true in light of modern experimental science. He talks about Walt Whitman, and his insight into the lack of duality between the mind and the body (mind is the body) and importance of feelings in our intellectual functioning, Proust and the nature of memory, George Eliot and free will, brain plasticity, and our ability to change, and Virginia Woolf and her great insights into consciousness and the nature of human ‘self’. Then he shows how Cezanne intimated the true nature of visual perception and Stravinsky of how we apprehend music. And, the part I found the most interesting and novel of all, how a French and then a Japanese chef came to find the essence of ‘deliciousness’, and how it related to the research on how we perceive taste.Lehrer’s insight is that there are many ways that may be equally valid to lead us into the nature of things. Art may offer a profound understanding into the workings of our brain, the understanding that’s in no less true and legitimate than quantifiable scientific research. To take matters further, he speaks about the limitations of science and about the inadequacy of the third culture (and science popularizers like Pinker, Dawkins, Wilson, for example) to embrace the more ambiguous realms. He advocates the necessity of a ‘fourth culture’- the bridge between humanities and experimental science.The whole book signals a recent noticeable departure, notably in The Head Trip as well, of some of the younger generation scientists from what Lehrer calls ‘reductionist science’. He means science that concerns itself only with the measurable and observable, and which ignores its own limitations and solutions and insights offered by other, less measurable sources like art, even though art can comfortably live with uncertainty to which much recent and not so recent research points as a fact of existence. Some truths may never be fully known through scientific means, yet each part of our existence (feelings and subjective insights included) can offer truths that are equally scientifically valid.A great read. I loved how it wove literature, art, brain research and a broader humanistic view of human nature together.

[treesap_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lehrer steps out boldly and perhaps brashly as he weaves together tales of revolutionary artists and their (so-called) prescient views of the human mind. Though sometimes a bit arbitrary and melodramatic, each chapter contains thoughtful insights into the dynamic interplay between a particular artist and the science of the artist's time and/or of modern times. Artist readers will glean fascinating insights into current neuroscience, and scientists will begin to fill in the gaps of artists who may only be only familiar by name. Lehrer's goal is to provide more than vignettes of artists interested in the workings of the mind. While not saying anything profoundly new, Lehrer reminds us of the importance of appreciating truth from a range of disciplines. He seeks to free the reader to appreciate the "other" sources as valid, and it is clear that he especially has the scientist in mind when he stretches to show that the artists were "discovering" truths about the mind long ago. Whether Lehrer's particular characters work for the story he seeks to sell is up to the individual reader, but his point is made irregardless. Overall, a pleasant and informative recasting. ..With a line that should be repeated often: "The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art."

[pescatello · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very interesting book that is also very well-written. At the end of the day though it was too long winded for me to get really engrossed in it.

[wvlibrarydude · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Explores the relationship of artists and scientists in the exploration of truth in regards to how our brain interacts with the world around us. My favorite chapters were Eliot/Freedom, Escoffier/Taste, Proust/Memory, Cezanne/Sight, and Woolf/Self.

[nativeroses_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A playful, fascinating little book that weaves the history of scientific studies of consciousness through the work of eight pathbreaking artists. The author's description of the work and milieu of artists who were initially rejected - Stravinsky, Stein, and Cezanne - is particularly insightful when related to our latest neurological understandings. For example, he explains how we create meaning from photons and the five neural layers of vision when discussing Cezanne. Neuroscience and the relation between thoughts and the body is used to examine Whitman. Neurogenesis and the creation of memory illuminates Marcel Proust's inquiry into the transcendent nature of memory. Eliot collided with her time's understandings of biological determinism and evolutionary theory. And so forth ... the author's writing becomes the most rhapsodic when he describes Escoffier's advances in cooking. A true pleasure to read. I'm trying not to hold it against the author that he's only 25. (punk)