Proust Was a Neuroscientist
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Proust Was a Neuroscientist
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3.9 of 5 stars
bBarnes Noble Discover Great New Writers/bbrSince the dawn of the modern age, science's greatest contribution to the world has been its ability to... read full description

reviews

Jun 03, 2008
Tim rated it: 5 of 5 stars
Proust Was a Neuroscientist turned out to be the book I'd been looking to read for a long time. Apparently there have been quite a few books prior to this one about the "third culture," the bridge between art and science (and unfortunately I've not read any of them) —Lehrer mentions E.O. Wilson's Consilience and Ian McEwan's Saturday (a kind of update on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway) as unsuccessful and successful works on the subject, respectively— but I was very pleased with the s More...
0 comments like (7 people liked it)
Feb 05, 2008
Jenna rated it: 3 of 5 stars
The premise of this book is great, but the author fails to make good enough connections half the time. A few of the chapters are fabulous and he should have quit while he was ahead, but I suppose that would have left a short book. My advice is to only read these chapters: 3 - Auguste Escoffier and The Essence of Taste (best chapter); 4 - Marcel Proust and The Method of Memory; and Igor Stravinsky and The Source of Music (2nd best chapter). Chapters 5 & 7 are also okay if you have more time, More...
0 comments like (5 people liked it)
Feb 09, 2008
Steve rated it: 4 of 5 stars
A fun and quick read that attempts to show how late-19th and early-20th Century artists presaged modern neuroscience. Each artist gets his or her own chapter and is paired with a scientific correlate. Here is the order of the pairings:

1) Walt Whitman - Feeling
2) George Eliot - Freedom
3) Auguste Escoffier - Taste
4) Marcel Proust - Memory
5) Paul Cezanne - Sight
6) Igor Stravinsky - Music
7) Gertrude Stein - Language
8) Virginia Woolf - Self
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0 comments like (3 people liked it)
Jul 23, 2009
Jafar rated it: 3 of 5 stars
Lehrer used to be a lab technician in a neuroscience lab. His lab work involved investigating memory. He would read Proust while waiting for his experiments to finish. Then it dawned to him that Proust was right about memory long before modern neuroscience got it right. And that was the forming idea for this book. Lehrer describes a few artists and their works to show that a lot of times artists discover truths about human nature while scientists of their time still have it wrong. Art foretellin More...
4 comments like (5 people liked it)
Feb 07, 2009
Jennifer rated it: 4 of 5 stars
Jonathan Lehrer examines the avante garde work of eight artists -- one poet (Walt Whitman), four novelists (George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf), one painter (Paul Cezanne), one composer (Igor Stravinsky), and one chef (Auguste Escoffier) -- and shows how it anticipated scientific principles that would later be discovered. The eight essays are absorbing, and Lehrer writes about science in a way that is accessible and enlightening for those more familiar with the human More...
2 comments like (5 people liked it)
Nov 28, 2011
Rae rated it: 4 of 5 stars
In this collection of artists and scientific explorations, Lehrer attempts to show how art can explain what science cannot. Cezanne painted swatches of color that show how our eyes really do see - not as pixels but as swatches. Virginia Wolfe knew the mind was a fragmented collection of sensations held together by a self that arose from that and science has still not been able to find if there is a where for that greater self.

Very enjoyable book and unlike How We Decide, not filled wit More...
2 comments like (1 person liked it)
Dec 22, 2008
Tattered Cover added it
The work of certain artists, poets and composers has anticipated neuroscientists, discoveries of what the brain does and how it does it. Read all about it! Well written, too.

Rachael
0 comments like (1 person liked it)
Feb 05, 2009
Bookmarks Magazine added it

Jonah Lehrer, a Rhodes scholar working in the lab of a Nobel Prize‚Äö_Ń"winning neuroscientist, was participating in experiments on the nature of memory while reading Proust's Swann's Way. He was amazed to find that the author had predicted his scientific findings nearly a century earlier. This epiphany inspired Lehrer to reexamine other great works of art. This highly readable book generally engaged and enlightened critics; Lehrer writes competently despite his "graduate-student earnest

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Dec 06, 2011
Jeff rated it: 4 of 5 stars
Lehrer's debut is a marvelous introduction into the linkages between literary modernism and neuroscience. Writing in a style at once youthful and insightful, he manages to balance an engrossing historical narrative of the life and work of some of the more colorful nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists with appropriately (at least for this reader) dumbed down scientific explanations of the foibles of memory, brain plasticity, and the language instinct. Jonah's intent doesn't seem to be to con More...
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Oct 10, 2011
Amanda rated it: 5 of 5 stars
I rarely read nonfiction. When I do I expect it to be accessible, interesting, and to inform me. The best kind of books, fiction or nonfiction, are the ones that make me think differently. This book completely changed the way I thought about literary heavy hitters and artists of all kinds. It concerns a subject near and dear to my heart: the relationship between art and science. Being an English major, I'm more often than not spotted with a Stephen King novel in my hand, Hemingway or McCarthy if More...
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Oct 03, 2011
Dan rated it: 3 of 5 stars
Lehrer does a clever thing by taking a slice through contemporary neuroscience as seen from the perspective of different authors. Considering the nature of emotions by reading Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” or memory by looking through the eyes of Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” allows the author to weave together science as revealed by art. I’m not sure I believe his basic argument that art precedes science—he’s cherry-picking the data here to only show positive examples and ignores the vas More...
0 comments like (1 person liked it)
Sep 13, 2011
David rated it: 5 of 5 stars
This is a truly perceptive book, about the linkages between art/language/music/cooking/writing and the science of the brain. Each chapter focuses on a different artist, and the insights of his/her artistry into the workings of the brain. I especially appreciated the chapter about Escoffier, the French chef who invented the concept of a restaurant menu. He discovered and put to use the taste of umami, a distinct reaction of taste buds to glutamate. He had a deep understanding about the effects of More...
0 comments like (2 people liked it)
Jun 30, 2011
Al rated it: 5 of 5 stars
Readers should not be put off by the title of this book; it could seem that it will deal with difficult subjects, but such an approach would be wrong.

This fascinating book looks at the works of eight 'artists' whom we might call 'modernist' (they fit into the period from ca. mid-19th to mid-20th centuries) from the perspective of a neuroscientist. Lehrer sees their works as containing prototypes of human qualities which would only later would be confirmed by the new discipline of neur More...
3 comments like
May 22, 2011
Oroboros72 rated it: 2 of 5 stars
I think that Lehrer's thesis is flawed. When he says that art is ahead of science, it doesn't really mean anything to me. Proust describes a connection between smell and memory before neuroscientists demonstrated that there was one, but that is not because he is an artist or because he had some special insight into memory that scientists couldn't or didn't have. He describes memory in this way because he is a human and that is how the memory system is set up. Before Proust, I am sure many ma More...
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May 08, 2011
Courtney rated it: 3 of 5 stars
Jonah Lehrer argues through eight case studies - Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf - that "celebrated artists discovered truths - real, tangible truths - about the mind, anticipating the findings of neuroscience." From the blurb:

We learn how Proust revealed the fallibility of memory, how George Eliot understood the brain's malleable nature, how the French chef Escoffier intuited umami (t
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0 comments like (1 person liked it)
Jan 04, 2011
Bill rated it: 4 of 5 stars
Pretty good. Makes some leaps in logic and attempts to revise history in a way to show that artists were discovering facts about how we perceive before we had the scientific evidence to prove them. Now we can prove them. OK, but that isn't really a surprise, and when you pick and choose from the past of art history, you can pretty much find examples to fit any scientific theory.

What is interesting are the big ideas: that there may be biological explanation for the need for an avant-gar More...
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Nov 25, 2009
K rated it: 2 of 5 stars
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3 comments like (4 people liked it)
Jul 12, 2009
Catherine rated it: 1 of 5 stars
You have no idea how much it pains me to dislike a book that Oliver Sacks hails as brilliant, but dear god, I found this tepid, unproven, and faintly ridiculous in turn. Lehrer never actually proves his thesis - that artists of several kinds anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience by several decades. Instead he describes a neuroscientific discovery and reads back into the work of selected artists a definitive revelation they never sought or articulated - the cause and effect he sees plainl More...
0 comments like (5 people liked it)
Jun 16, 2009
Jane rated it: 4 of 5 stars
This book says a lot of fascinating things, but I can't escape the feeling that it is watered down science and simplified literary criticism. All in all, it is a good read with plenty of thought-provoking topics condensed into eight chapters. Not too challenging of a read, but it points to and references works that are more challenging and sheds some light on the ridiculousness of the "cultural divide" between sciences and humanities. The problem with this book,is that it assumes th More...
2 comments like (1 person liked it)
Dec 28, 2011
Claudia rated it: 3 of 5 stars
Me molesta un poco la forma en que se plantea la idea acerca de que los artistas van adelantados a la neurociencia porque se pueden encontrar observaciones relacionadas al funcionamiento del cerebro en el arte de muchos. ParecerĂ­a mas bien obvio, dado que son las personas que observan el comportamiento de la gente las que descubren como funcionamos y es a partir de ideas obtenidas del sentido comĂşn como se llega a las teorĂ­as cientĂ­ficas. Lo Ăşnico que me dicen las afirmaciones del autor es que e More...
1 comment like
Aug 16, 2011
Tokreads rated it: 3 of 5 stars
The book Proust was a neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer allowed a comprehensive insight into what he describes as the “4th culture” – a merging of the natural sciences and the arts. Lehrer explores various artist’s works, from the cook to the painter, musician and writer and their early discoveries of the complex workings of the brain. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book lies in the connections that Lehrer draws between these works of artists and the history behind the neuroscience, whi More...
1 comment like
Feb 20, 2011
James rated it: 3 of 5 stars
Since I myself recently became a neuroscientist, I was intrigued to read this book I had heard good things about. And it was a good read, mostly. Lehrer's main thesis, which he tries to argue in each chapter, is that artists, because of their intuitive and wholistic way of thinking about the human condition, have come to the realization of certain neurological truths that science is just beginning to elucidate. This includes the fallacy of the brain/body dichotomy (Whitman), the process of tho More...
1 comment like (1 person liked it)
Nov 14, 2010
Brynn rated it: 5 of 5 stars
"But measurement is always imperfect, and explanations are easy to invent." (3)

Jane Austen: "Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken." (25)

George Eliot: "all meanings depend on the key of interpretation." (44)

George Eliot: "the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than anyone would More...
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Apr 17, 2011
Sophie rated it: 3 of 5 stars
The idea behind this is that artists first thought of ideas that neuroscience only afterwards 'discovered'. E.g. Proust first set out that memory is transient and can be recalled randomly by, for example, the taste of a madeleine, something that was found to be true later by experiment.

Does that sound a bit simplistic to you? It did to me. And it was. Some of the science explanations are a bit patronising in their dumbing down and a lot of the connections are a bit far-fetched. It's an More...
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Apr 19, 2011
Jackie rated it: 2 of 5 stars
A lot of the brain stuff is interesting, but I completely failed to make many of the connections between the brains and the artists. Possibly, this is because I'm not familiar most of the works referenced. But I think that some of my confusion is because Lehrer didn't make convincing arguments or explinations. Some sections are more clearly spelled out than others.

George Eliot changed religions and believed in free will and one of her characters got married. Therefore: Brain plastici More...
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Sep 19, 2010
Megan rated it: 3 of 5 stars
Former lab assistant and current science writer Jonah Lehrer's "Proust Was a Neuroscientist" aims to unite science and the arts by explaining the connections between a select group of writers, painters, composers and chefs and the advanced sciences their works anticipated.

Lehrer looks at how Proust's experience with a madeleine inspired his discovery about memory's failings, how TS Eliot discovered the plasticity of the brain and how Paul Cezanne figured out how the eye rea More...
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Jan 07, 2009
Laurel rated it: 4 of 5 stars
This book is an interesting look into the relationship between art and science as described through the works of five or six artists of varying disciplines. I think that science often ignores or downplays the role art or literature has had in certain discoveries or advances, whether or not they are listed in this book. Or perhaps the two areas progress individually -- which is unlikely as the exchange is at least one-way, with authors, often those of science fiction, incorporating new or hypot More...
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Nov 21, 2010
Joffy rated it: 4 of 5 stars
L'autore cerca di costruire un ponte tra scoperte scientifiche nel campo delle neuroscienze, rigorosamente ottenute col metodo sperimentale, e l'opera di vari artisti. La pecca è che il lato scientifico potrebbe risultare ostico per i non addetti ai lavori soprattutto perché, a volte, non si riesce bene ad afferrare dove sta avvenendo il paragone. Tuttavia entrambi gli aspetti sono trattati in modo soddisfacente e particolareggiato con uno stile semplice, chiaro, lineare. Lo consiglio.

The Author More...
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Aug 24, 2010
Mag rated it: 5 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 lac More...
0 comments like (1 person liked it)
Jul 28, 2010
Jan added it
PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST by Jonah Lehrer (editor at large for SEED with a blog: “The Frontal Cortex”) documents how “science is not the only path to knowledge” since the arts (novels, symphonies, poetry, paintings, cookbooks!) often precede scientific discoveries. It seems almost everything I learned about the nervous system is wrong, and artists knew this at least a hundred years before science. Lehrer argues for C.P. Snow’s “Third Culture” as a celebration of pluralism and equitable dialogu More...
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