Proust Was a Neuroscientist Quotes

“Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination. Unfortunately, our current culture subscribes to a very narrow definition of truth. If something can’t be quantified and calculated, then it can’t be true. Because this strict scientific approach has explained so much, we assume that it can explain everything. But every method, even the experimental method, has limits. 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. 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.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery. Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“Why is music capable of inflicting such pain? Because it works on our feelings directly. No ideas interfere with its emotions. This is why "all art aspires to the condition of music." The symphony gives us the thrill of uncertainty--the pleasurable anxiety of searching for a pattern--but without the risks of real life. When we listen to music, we are moved by an abstraction. We feel, but we don't know why.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“To have a style is to be stuck.”
― Jonah Lehrer from Milton Glaser, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“Suffering through his classes, the young Igor steeped himself in angst. 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.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“Science has discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: 'all meanings depend on the key of interpretation.' What makes us human, and what makes each of us his or her own human, is not simply the genes that we have buried into our base pairs, but how our cells, in dialogue with our environment, feed back to our DNA, changing the way we read ourselves. Life is a dialectic.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“We are the poem, his poem says, that emerges from the unity of the body and the mind. That fragile unity--this brief parenthesis of being--is all we have. Celebrate it.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“There is a presence in what is missing.” That presence is our own.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“...Prions violate most of biology's sacred rules. They are one of those annoying reminders of how much we don't know.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“If our DNA has a literary equivalent, it's Finnegan's Wake.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“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.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“Nature, however, writes astonishingly complicated prose.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“Stein wanted to separate language from the yoke of "having to say something." Modern literature, she announced, must admit its limits. Nothing can ever really be described. Words, like paint, are not a mirror.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“Emerson looked like a Puritan minister, with abrupt cheekbones and a long, bony nose. A man of solitude, he was prone to bouts of selfless self-absorption. "I like the silent church before the service begins," he confessed in "Self-Reliance." He wrote in his journal that he liked man, but not men. When he wanted to think, he would take long walks by himself in the woods.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist

“There is a presence in what is missing." That presence is our own.”
― Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist