Proust Was a Neuroscientist

by Jonah Lehrer

A memory is only as real as the last time you remembered it. The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes.

So the purely objective memory, the one "true" to the original taste of the madeleine, is the one memory you will never know. The moment you remember the cookie's taste is the same moment you forget what it really tasted like.

"The only paradise is paradise lost.")

Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.

"How paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory ... The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years."

This is Proust's guilty secret: we have to misremember something in order to remember it.

Our memories obsess us precisely because they disobey every logic, because we never know what we will retain and what we will forget.

Every time we conjure up our pasts, the branches of our recollections become malleable again. While the prions that mark our memories are virtually immortal, their dendritic details are always being altered, shuttling between the poles of remembering and forgetting. The past is at once perpetual and ephemeral.

Prions reflect this fact, since they have an element of randomness built into their structure. They don't mind fibbing.

Our brain cells were strange things, fascinated not by dots of light but by angles of lines.*

These neurons preferred contrast over brightness, edges over curves.

the practical human brain is not interested in a camera like truth; it just wants the scene to make sense.

Before we can make sense of our sensations, we have to impress our illusions upon them.

"Let us be true, even if we are ugly"—were

He knew that the mind makes the world, just as a painter makes a painting.

The very existence of Cézanne's nonfinito style, the fact that the brain could find meaning in nothing, seemed to disprove any theory of mind that reduced our vision to pixels of light.

Reality is continually refined, until the original sensation—that incomplete canvas—is swallowed by our subjectivity.

The exact same neurons respond when we actually see a mountain and when we just imagine a mountain. There is no such thing as immaculate perception.

"A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever account of his affairs the lawyer finds it most expedient to give."

Art, Cézanne reminds us, is surrounded by artifice.

The shocking fact is that sight is like art. What we see is not real. It has been bent to fit our canvas, which is the brain.

The "Augurs" don't augur well.

Nothing is sacred. Nature is noise. Music is nothing but a sliver of sound that we have learned how to hear.

Nothing is difficult forever.

"Works of art cannot be created at present, they can only be prepared for by means of revolutionary activity, by destroying and crushing everything that is worth destroying and crushing."*

"If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art."

This nervous anticipation, says Meyer, "is the whole raison d'être of the passage, for its purpose is precisely to delay the cadence in the tonic." The uncertainty makes the feeling. Music is a form whose meaning depends upon its violation.

Pretty noises are boring. Music is only interesting when it confronts us with tension, and the source of tension is conflict. Stravinsky's insight was that what the audience really wanted was to be denied what it wanted.

The art that makes us feel is the art that makes us hurt. And nothing hurts us like a pitiless symphony.

When we listen to music, we are moved by an abstraction. We feel, but we don't know why.

"He not busy being born is busy dying."

"To listen is an effort," he once said, "and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also."

Music is only feeling. It always upsets our soul. If we censored every song that filled people with irrational emotions, then we would have no songs left to play.

We make art out of the uncertainty.

In the modernist vision of The Rite, music is simply a syntax of violated patterns. It doesn't become better over time, it just becomes different.

By tempting us with fragile patterns, music taps into the most basic brain circuitry.

The premiere of The Rite, with its methodical dismantling of the audience's musical expectations, literally simulated madness. By subverting the listeners' dopamine neurons, it also subverted their sanity. Everything about it felt wrong.

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. If the art feels difficult, it is only because our neurons are stretching to understand it. The pain flows from the growth. As Nietzsche sadistically declared, "If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in; only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory."

If not for the difficulty of the avant-garde, we would worship nothing but that which we already know. This is what Stravinsky knew: music is made by the mind, and the mind can learn to listen to almost anything.

All music needs is a violated pattern, an order interrupted by a disorder, for in that acoustic friction, we hallucinate a feeling. Music is that feeling.

"There is no good nonsense without sense,"

Stein wanted to separate language from the yoke of "having to say something."

We take our scattered thoughts and inconstant sensations and we bind them into something solid.

The self invents itself.

we invented the self in order to ignore our innate contradictions.

In a world made of fragments, the self is our sole "theme, recurring, half remembered, half foreseen." If it didn't exist, then nothing would exist.

We invent ourselves out of our own sensations.

"Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo ... surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end."