Proust Was a Neuroscientist

by Jonah Lehrer

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

To whip a man's body was to whip a man's soul.

while it is important "never to beat and bruise one's wings against the inevitable," it is always possible "to throw the whole force of one's soul towards the achievement of some possible better." You can always change your life.

It is at these tiny crossings that our memories are made: not in the trunk of the neuronal tree, but in its sprawling canopy.

Music is only interesting when it confronts us with tension, and the source of tension is conflict.

We make art out of the uncertainty.

The self is simply this subject; it is the story we tell ourselves about our experiences.

The point is that Mrs. Dalloway does draw herself together. She makes herself real, creating a "world of her own wherever she happens to be." This is what we all do every day. We take our scattered thoughts and inconstant sensations and we bind them into something solid. The self invents itself.

The artist describes what the scientist can't. Though we are nothing but flickering chemicals and ephemeral voltages, the self seems real.

Her art describes us as we are, as a "queer amalgamation of dream and reality, that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow."

As Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist and lepidopterist, once put it, "The greater one's science, the deeper the sense of mystery."