Proust Was a Neuroscientist

by Jonah Lehrer

As scientists were beginning to separate thoughts into their anatomical parts, these artists wanted to understand consciousness from the inside. Our truth, they said, must begin with us, with what reality feels like.

"The mind has become aware of itself.")

Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination.

(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. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.

Ephemeral as they seem, our feelings are actually rooted in the movements of our muscles and the palpitations of our insides. Furthermore, these material feelings are an essential element of the thinking process. As the neuro-scientist Antonio Damasio notes, "The mind is embodied ... not just embrained."

"You might as easily tell how much money is in a safe feeling the knob on the door as tell how much brain a man has by feeling the bumps on his head."

"The poet stands among partial men for the complete man," Emerson said. "He reattaches things to the whole."

'Walt, you are doing miracles for those proust was a neuroscientist fellows in the hospitals.' I wasn't. I was ... doing miracles for myself."

... I thus reached the conclusion that a man is not his brain, or any one part of it, but all of his economy, and that to lose any part must lessen this sense of his own existence."

Since soul is body and body is soul,

"Lack one lacks both."

"We can never seek amongst these processes for results which shall be invariable,"

"Exceptions remain to every empirical law of our mental life, and can only be treated as so many individual aberrations."

"There is a presence in what is missing." That pre...

"There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds."

"There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it."

"Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending,"

"we are a process and an unfolding."

The genius of the scientific method, however, is that it accepts no permanent solution. Skepticism is its solvent, for every theory is imperfect.

The mind is never beyond redemption, for no environment can extinguish neurogenesis. As long as we are alive, important parts of the brain are dividing. The brain is not marble, it is clay, and our clay never hardens.

Other scientists have discovered that antidepressants work by stimulating neurogenesis (at least in rodents), implying that depression is ultimately caused by a decrease in the amount of new neurons, and not by a lack of serotonin. A new class of antidepressants is being developed that targets the neurogenesis pathway. For some reason, newborn brain cells make us happy.

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

Nature, however, writes astonishingly complicated prose.

our DNA has a literary equivalent, it's Finnegans Wake.

for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: "all meanings depend on the key of interpretation."

Our human DNA is defined by its multiplicity of possible meanings; it is a code that requires context.

The best metaphor for our DNA is literature. Like all classic literary texts, our genome is defined not by the certainty of its meaning, but by its linguistic instability, its ability to encourage a multiplicity of interpretations.

Bob Dylan once said, "I accept chaos. I'm not sure whether it accepts me."

As Eliot wrote in the preface to Middlemarch, "the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than anyone would imagine."

As Karl Popper once said, life is not a clock, it is a cloud.

"Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience."

We are neither fully free nor fully determined. The world is full of constraints, but we are able to make our own way.

"I refuse," she wrote, "to adopt any formula which does not get itself clothed for me in some human figure and individual experience."

We are only chains of carbon, but we transcend our source. Evolution has given us the gift of infinite individuality.

What every other chef was throwing away—the scraps of tendon and oxtail, the tops of celery, the ends of onion, and the irregular corners of carrot—Escoffier was simmering into sublimity.

The tongue loves what the body needs.

Neuroscience excels at dissecting the bottom of sensation. What our dinner demonstrates is that the mind needs a top.

Our human brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that prejudices feel like facts, opinions are indistinguishable from the actual sensation.

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.

away. The end result is that our brains begin to reflect what we eat.

"No theory, no formula, and no recipe can take the place of experience."

"If it works, it is true."

The impression is for the writer what experimentation is for the scientist"),

reality is best understood subjectively, its truths accessed intuitively.

Proust's fiction, which is mostly nonfiction, explores how time mutates memory.

"It is a labor in vain to attempt to recapture memory: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile..." Why does Proust think the past is so elusive? Why is the act of remembering a "labor in vain"?

We bend the facts to suit our story, as "our intelligence reworks the experience."

in the Search, the instability and inaccuracy of memory is the moral.

"I am obliged to depict errors," Proust wrote in a letter to Jacques Rivière, "without feeling compelled to say that I consider them to be errors." Because every memory is full of errors, there's no need to keep track.