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.