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Proust Was a Neuroscientist
Jonah Lehrer
Houghton Mifflin
November 2007
On Sale: November 1, 2007
256 pages
ISBN: 0618620109
EAN: 9780618620104
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A gifted young writer explores the unexpected links between
art and modern science. From a rising journalist and Rhodes
scholar, a dazzling look at how five writers, a painter, a
composer, and a chef discovered the truth about the mind. In
this technology-driven age, its 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 and original
book, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact,
where the brain is concerned, art got there first. Focusing
on 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 human mind
that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for
example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of
memory; how George Eliot discovered the brains 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 Chomsky. Its the ultimate tale of
art trumping science. More broadly, Lehrer shows that there
is 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 to listen
more closely to art, for the right minds can combine the
best of both to brilliant effect.
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