Proust Was a Neuroscientist

by Jonah Lehrer

Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces. What science forgets is that this isn't how we experience the world. (We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.) It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art.

"What kind of an emotion of fear," he wondered, "would be left [after seeing the bear] if the feeling of quickened heart beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose bumps nor of visceral stirrings, were present?" James's answer was simple: without the body there would be no fear, for an emotion begins as the perception of a bodily change. When it comes to the drama of feelings, our flesh is the stage.

Although we typically assume that our emotions interfere with reason, Damasio's emotionless patients proved incapable of making reasonable decisions.

"Love," Lewes wrote, "defies all calculation." "We are not 'judicious' in love; we do not select those whom we 'ought to love,' but those whom we cannot help loving."

Life progressed because of disorder, not despite it.

Since we each start every day with a slightly new brain, neurogenesis ensures that we are never done with our changes.

The invention of neural plasticity, which is encoded by the genome, lets each of us transcend our genome. We emerge, character like, from the vague alphabet of our text. Of course, to accept the freedom inherent in the human brain—to know that the individual is not genetically predestined—is also to accept the fact that we have no single solutions. Every day each one of us is given the gift of new neurons and plastic cortical cells; only we can decide what our brains will become.

what biologists call "developmental noise." (This is also why your left hand and right hand have different fingerprints.)

This same principle is even at work in our brain. Neuroscientist Fred Gage has found that retrotransposons—junk genes that randomly jump around the human genome—are present at unusually high numbers in neurons. In fact, these trouble making scraps of DNA insert themselves into almost 80 percent of our brain cells, arbitrarily altering their genetic program.

Even identical twins with identical DNA have strikingly dissimilar brains.

He believed that the greatest threat to public health was the modern transformation of dining from a "pleasurable occasion into an unnecessary chore."

As the philosopher Donald Davidson argued, it is ultimately impossible to distinguish between a subjective contribution to knowledge that comes from our selves (what he calls our "scheme") and an objective contribution that comes from the outside world ("the content"). In Davidson's influential epistemology, the "organizing system and something waiting to be organized" are hopelessly interdependent. Without our subjectivity we could never decipher our sensations, and without our sensations we would have nothing about which to be subjective. Before you can taste the wine you have to judge it.

He invented the chef's tasting menu as an educational tool, for he was confident that people could learn how to eat.

This is hilarious

A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it.

As long as we have memories to recall, the margins of those memories are being modified to fit what we know now. Synapses are crossed out, dendrites are tweaked, and the memorized moment that feels so honest is thoroughly revised.

Proust intuitively knew that our memories required this transformative process. If you prevent the memory from changing, it ceases to exist. Combray is lost. This is Proust's guilty secret: we have to misremember something in order to remember it.

Prions are roughly defined as a class of proteins that can exist in two functionally distinct states (every other protein has only one natural state).

No, many, many proteins are constantly cycling through two or more functionally distinct states.

Reality is not out there waiting to be witnessed; reality is made by the mind.

The symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire, a natural skeptic of science, reviewed a photographic exhibition in 1859 by proclaiming the limits of the new medium. Its accuracy, he said, is deceptive, nothing more than phony simulacra of what was really out there. The photographer was even—and Baudelaire only used this insult in matters of grave import—a materialist.

With time, the impressionists grew more radical. This was partly due to eye troubles: Monet became blind (but didn't stop painting the bridges of Giverny). Vincent van Gogh, drinker of kerosene, turpentine, and absinthe, probably thought the coronas he painted around stars and streetlamps were real. Edgar Degas became severely myopic, which led him to do more and more sculpture ("I must learn a blind man's trade now," Degas said). Auguste Renoir, poisoned by his pastel paints, became a rheumatic cripple. But whether their abstraction was motivated by physiology or philosophy, it became increasingly clear that the impressionists had broken with the staid traditions of academic realism.*

photons. And while seeing begins with these impressions, it quickly moves beyond their vague suggestions. After all, the practical human brain is not interested in a camera like truth; it just wants the scene to make sense.

He would later describe his childhood "as a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell."

The sadistic newness of The Rite's patterns, its stubborn refusal to conform to our learned expectations, is the dirty secret of its discontent. By disobeying every rule we think we know, Stravinsky forces us to confront the fact that we have expectations, that the mind anticipates certain types of order, followed by certain types of release. But in The Rite, these expectations are rendered useless. We do not know what note will come next. And this makes us angry.

How do we escape this neurological trap? By paying attention to art. The artist is engaged in a perpetual struggle against the positive-feedback loop of the brain, desperate to create an experience that no one has ever had before. And while the poet must struggle to invent a new metaphor and the novelist a new story, the composer must discover the undiscovered pattern, for the originality is the source of the emotion.

Split-brain patients are living proof of our many different minds. When the corpus callosum is cut, the multiple selves are suddenly free to be themselves. The brain stops suppressing its internal inconsistencies. One patient reading a book with his left hemisphere found that his right hemisphere, being illiterate, was extremely bored by the letters on the page. The right hemisphere commanded the left hand to throw the book away. Another patient put on his clothes with his left hand while his right hand busily took them off. A different patient had a left hand that was rude to his wife. Only his right hand (and left brain) was in love.

Henry James defined the writer as someone on whom nothing is lost; artists must heed his call and not ignore science's inspiring descriptions of reality. Every humanist should read Nature. At the same time, the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only truths. No knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge.