Proust Was a NeuroscientistThe New York Times–bestselling author provides an “entertaining” look at how artists enlighten us about the workings of the brain (New York magazine). In this book, the author of How We Decide and Imagine: How Creativity Works “writes skillfully and coherently about both art and science”—and about the connections between the two (Entertainment Weekly). In this technology-driven age, it’s tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, it’s cured countless diseases and sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer explains, 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. 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. “His book marks the arrival of an important new thinker . . . Wise and fresh.” —Los Angeles Times |
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abstract actually artists auditory cortex Auguste Escoffier become Beeman began begins believed body brain cells Cézanne Cézanne’s Chomsky chord consciousness CPEB creative Dalloway demi-glace describe discovered dissonance Dylan Emerson emotions ence Escoffier Escoffier’s everything experience experimental fact feeling fiction genes genome George Eliot Gertrude Stein glutamate human Ibid idea Igor Stravinsky imagination insight invented knew language Laplace Leaves of Grass light look madeleine memory Middlemarch mind modern modernist mystery nature neural neurogenesis neurons neuroscience neuroscientists never noise novel one’s painting patients patterns Paul Cézanne phrenology Picasso poems poet poetry postimpressionist prions protein Proust psychology reality realized receptors right hemisphere Rite sauce Schoenberg scientific scientists sensations sense sensory sentences smell solved song soul sound structure T. S. Eliot taste theory thing thought tion truth umami Virginia Woolf visual cortex wanted Whitman William James words writing wrote York Zola