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| Proust Was a Neuroscientist | 
 enlarge | Author: Jonah Lehrer
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $7.12
You Save: $7.83 (52%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  30 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 0547085907
Dewey Decimal Number: 500
EAN: 9780547085906
Publication Date: September 1, 2008
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Significant Seven, December 2007: Proust may have been more neurasthenic than neuroscientist, but Jonah Lehrer argues in Proust Was a Neuroscientist that he (and many of his fellow artists) made discoveries about the brain that it took science decades to catch up with (in Proust's case, that memory is a process, not a repository). Lehrer weaves back and forth between art and science in eight graceful portraits of artists (mostly writers, along with a chef, a painter, and a composer) who understood, better at times than atomizing scientists, that truth can begin with "what reality feels like." Sometimes it's the art that's most evocative in his tales, sometimes the science: Lehrer writes about them with equal ease and clarity, and with a youthful confidence that art and science, long divided, may yet be reconciled. --Tom Nissley
Product Description
As Jonah Lehrer demonstrates 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 nineteenth- and twentieth- century 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 neuroscience is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot understood the brain's Malleability; how the French chef Escoffier intuited umami (the fifth taste); how Cezanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language. It's a riveting tale of art trumping science again and again. 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 25 more reviews...
 A Real Mind-stretcher December 31, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Serious thinkers about what it means to be human should rejoice that Jonah Lehrer freed himself from the confines of the neuroscience lab and found time to create this synthesis of science and arts. "Proust Was a Neuroscientist" is the most intelligent piece of writing I've come across in a very long time. Read it. It will not only exercise your analytical skills, but it will also help you pull the fragments of your perceptions into a more coherent whole. I look forward to further insights in the next work of this very interesting interdisciplinary thinker.
 Just read his chapter on Escoffier December 15, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
At the end of this book the author admits that he's not a very good scientific researcher.
With all due respect I think his observation is borne out by much of this book which cherry picks from early artists to support the idea that 19th century artists predicted the advent of neuroscience.
In the case of Escoffier (which probably should've been made into a full book in its own right), the thesis is well supported: until Escoffier both recieved and contemporary thinking said we only had four taste senses. For his part, Escoffier piloted a cuisine into prominence among other things by featuring dishes that played off that fifth taste...umami.
Japanese for delicious umami is that taste that exists in soy sauce. It's that extra zing that's not sweet, sour, bitter or salty but yummy.
Not yummy is the rest of this book which revisits the art of the likes of Gertrude Stein and Michel Proust and Stravinsky to suggest these artists specifically forcast later developments in neuroscience.
To my ear, the cocophany of Rite of Spring forecast nothing except the propensity for its patrons to need aspirin. Likewise, Stein to facilitate requests for refunds.
But even leaving my personal taste aside, it remains true that the typically unstructured nature of modern art could be said to stand for almost anything.
Like I said, this book is at its best discussing Escoffier. It's a short chapter, so if you see this book, you should probably just read that one and spare yourself the wasted time of the rest of this book.
As a final note, based on the strenght of his Escoffier chapter alone, I will peruse this author's next book. You have to be really bright to come up with an idea like he did for this book and I suspect this author may yet have something wonderful in him.
Art and Science November 11, 2008
Superb insights into how artists and writers observed insights into human nature, personality, freedom and natural law before and over and against what science in their time believed. How truth is glimpsed through art.
Lehrer's novel was only half right. October 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer attempts to reveal ideas from artists about the mind that neuroscience is recently discovering as true. Lehrer explains both the artistic and scientific concepts in such a way that anyone could understand. This novel is not a hardcore lesson in neuroscience or art but instead a decent blend of both fields.
The different chapters look at a poet, four novelists, a chef, a painter, and a composer. The chapters each follow similar patterns. Lehrer initially prepares us for each artist with a brief biography at the beginning. He then delves into certain works and exposes the neurological insights of the artists. Once we understand the artist's view on the mind, Lehrer shifts from art to science to show discoveries in neuroscience that pertain to the artist's ideas. Finally, Lehrer attempts to draw similarities between what the artist believed and what neuroscience has discovered.
The book first examines the poet Walt Whitman, who saw the mind and body as inseparable. George Eliot, the novelist who believed human freedom arose from our mind's malleability, comes next. The French chef Auguste Escoffier did wonders for the culinary arts with his ideas on the plasticity of taste, the power of suggestion, and the importance of our sense of smell in tasting food. Marcel Proust uncovered the role of smell and taste in our memories as well as the memory's fallibility. Paul Cezanne used his paintings to show that our perception plays a huge role in what and how we see the world around us. The composer Igor Stravinsky revealed that we can only begin to feel music when "the pattern we imagine starts to break down" (Lehrer 132). Gertrude Stein demonstrated that language did not necessarily have to make sense so long as the structure of the grammar remained intact. Lehrer finishes the novel with a chapter about Virginia Woolf, who dug deep into herself in an attempt to discover the source of our "self."
Walt Whitman
"This is the moral of Whitman's poetic sprawl: the human being is an irreducible whole" (Lehrer 5). Before and during Whitman's time, the common belief was that the body and spirit were two separate entities. Lehrer supplements Whitman's idea that our feelings are due to interactions between the mind and body by citing the work of Antonio Damasio. Damasio used four decks of cards where two decks contained big payouts and even bigger punishments and the other two decks had smaller payouts and very few punishments. He tested the electrical conductance of a test subject's palms and found that the subject's hand would get "nervous" just reaching toward the negative decks, long before the subject's mind understood.
George Eliot
I could not quite understand what Lehrer was getting at with this chapter. He mentions Eliot's idea that our ability to change ourselves gives us an innate freedom and then goes into details about neurogenesis and the fact that DNA does not determine our brains; however, the topics do not seem to really blend well. Steps following protein transcription from RNA involve plenty of changes that DNA does not determine, and the environment around any organism plays a huge role in how it behaves. I just could not find the connection between freedoms built into us with the neuroscience Lehrer chose to include.
Auguste Escoffier
Lehrer redeemed himself with this chapter. Escoffier's discovery of umami before it was scientifically investigated as well as his understanding of smell's involvement in taste and the power of suggestion made this chapter much more interesting to read than the previous Eliot chapter. Two studies, one on cheap red wine and the other on white wine with red food coloring, revealed what had to be an embarrassing truth about the power of suggestion to a decent number of wine experts.
Marcel Proust
Proust's thoughts on the memory meshed well with the discoveries in neuroscience. His verbose recollection of eating a madeleine and the memories that sprang from it match perfectly with the smell and taste "connect directly to the hippocampus, the center of the brain's long-term memory" (Lehrer 80). The fallibility of memory that Proust realized is another intriguing aspect of neuroscience, the idea that we can "remember" something without actually experiencing it or the notion that "we have to misremember something in order to remember it" (Lehrer 89).
Paul Cezanne
"Cezanne's epiphany was that our impressions require interpretation; to look is to create what you see" (Lehrer 97). Perception is such a huge part of our senses; Cezanne used his paintings to show us that we can use our minds to complete the picture. Lehrer's inclusion of two of Cezanne's paintings helped to supplement this idea. "His art shows us what we cannot see, which is how we see" (Lehrer 104). Lehrer could have completely skipped connecting Cezanne to neuroscience; the pictures speak for themselves.
Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf
After building up his evidence so well with the chapters on Escoffier, Proust, and Cezanne, Lehrer unfortunately began to lose me again with these last three chapters. Stravinsky "knew" that people's plastic brains could be taught to enjoy and feel new music, although the same could be said for Elvis Presley, Madonna, or any of the other breakthrough musical artists. Gertrude Stein attempted to show that the structure of language is built into us by making words meaningless. Lehrer made a good point that statistics could not truly determine the words in a sentence, as shown through some of Stein's improbably sentences, but the good points end there in that chapter. Virginia Woolf's ideas about the self were intriguing but lacked the connection to neuroscience that some of the other chapters possessed.
Proust Was a Neuroscientist was an interesting recreational read. The points where art and science blended seamlessly easily kept my attention; however, certain chapters lost the connection between the fields, and the book as a whole did not delve into neuroscience as much as I had hoped.
Lighten up, for heaven's sake, and just enjoy! October 19, 2008
This book reveals the inventive, entertaining and original perspective of a very talented young man. No, dear huffy-puppies -- and you know who you are -- who are so terribly incensed that someone would try to convince the world that Proust was a neuroscientist and, gosh, we who are so smart and well-read are compelled to pick holes in the premise of this book, why on earth would you, or anyone with half a brain, take its title seriously? Mr. Lehrer obviously took a proposition, i.e., artistic inspiration, when viewed after the fact, often appears to anticipate scientific thought, and ran with it. Gosh! String 'im up! In the meantime, those of us who can appreciate talent without being personally threatened can relax and indulge in a fine read. P.S. I was once a professional violinist, a portrait painter, love to experiment in cooking new dishes and have degrees in English Literature and French Literature, so I'm quite familiar with the subjects and people Mr. Lehrer discussed. I HIGHLY recommend this book.
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