Proust Was a Neuroscientist
by Jonah Lehrer
A dazzling intellectual inquiry into the nature of truth and the relationship between art and science

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Read by James Boles

In this technology-driven age, it's tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling and original book, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, when it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first.

Taking a group of artists—a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer and a handful of novelists—Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the human mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain's malleability: how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste); how Cezanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language-a full half-century before Chomsky. It's the ultimate tale of art trumping science.

An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first rate science writing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science to listen more closely to art, for the willing mind can combine the best of both to brilliant effect.

AUTHOR BIO

Jonah Lehrer is editor-at-large for Seed Magazine. A graduate of Columbia University and a Rhodes scholar, Lehrer has worked in the lab of Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel and in the kitchens of Le Cirque 2000 and Le Bernardin. He has written for Nature, NPR, NOVA ScienceNow, and The MIT Technology Review, and he writes a highly regarded blog, The Frontal Cortex.

REVIEWS

"That deep insights about human nature come first to poets and artists, to be systematically explored by scientists only decades or centuries later, is not a new idea--but I have never seen it more brilliantly illustrated than in this amazing first book by Jonah Lehrer, who himself bridges "the two cultures" with ease and grace. His clear and vivid writing--incisive and thoughtful, yet sensitive and modest--is a special pleasure."—Oliver Sachs

“Looked at one way, Proust Was a Neuroscientist is a lucid summary of the brain as seen by contemporary neuroscience; looked at again, it is an inspired interpretation of the work of eight 19th and 20th century artists and writers whose insights, Lehrer claims, anticipated our current understanding.... In enlarging our understanding of eight artists while teaching us how brains work (and enlarging our understanding of brains by teaching us how those artists worked), he's produced what his modernist heroes also sought: a liberating new way to see the world.—Los Angeles Times

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