Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Well written mashup between the arts and cognitive neuroscience AntDina I put Jonah in the same category as Malcolm Gladwell and Simon Speck: great points derived from insightful thinking surrounded by science and solid storytelling. This is book I'd give away to those who see the crossover from cognitive neuroscience and the arts. (Yes, artists got it right before the profs). The book moves at a comfortable pace and is full of anecdotal evidence to carry you down the river of his thinking. Readers should know Lehrer had a bit of controversy about his scientific due diligence in other works. Personally I . Very Interesting and Enjoyable Read I really enjoyed the read. I know some reviewers have said things like "No, Proust was not a scientist", or "the author is just making up connections, the discoveries were made by scientists Not these artists", and so on. I think those reviewers are missing the point and taking things way too literally. I'm an artist myself so I really connected with these chapters about how these masterful artists intuitively made connections about the human mind that hadn't been discovered or at least published at the time they did so, it's an inter. A good analysis of the modern literature. Edoardo Angeloni The author is able to entry in the soul of Proust, Cézanne, Withman, Eliot not only for the greatness in the art and literature, but also for their visions by a psychological point of view. In those men the strongness of their art was united to a particular study of the human life. This analysis goes in the deep levels of the mind, so we can retain this context particularly important for a knowledge of the modern times. The correlations of those different aspects is interesting, so we can see the narrow relation between the wor

Significant Seven, December 2007: Proust may have been more neurasthenic than neuroscientist, but Jonah Lehrer argues in Proust Was a Neuroscientist that he (and many of his fellow artists) made discoveries about the brain that it took science decades to catch up with (in Proust's case, that memory is a process, not a repository). --Tom Nissley. Lehrer weaves back and forth between art and science in eight graceful portraits of artists (mostly writers, along with a chef, a painter, and a composer) who understood, better at times than atomizing scienti

After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. 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 mind that science is only now rediscovering. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to knowledge. In this technology-driven age, it’s tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. 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 and art to listen more closely to each other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect.. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and this is what art knows better than science. 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 identified umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language – a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. More broadly, Lehrer shows that there’s a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. In fact, when it