Synopses & Reviews
From a rising journalist and Rhodes scholar, a dazzling look at how five writers, a painter, a composer, and a chef discovered the truth about the mind.
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, where the brain is concerned, art got there first.
Focusing on 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.
More broadly, Lehrer shows that there is a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and this is what art knows better than 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 right minds can combine the best of both to brilliant effect.
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"Solid science journalism with an essayist's flair." Kirkus Reviews
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"Brilliantly illustrated...amazing....[Jonah Lehrer's] clear and vivid writing incisive and thoughtful, yet sensitive and modest is a special pleasure." Oliver Sacks
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"Jonah Lehrer provides a fresh and unique look at eight of the artists who define modern culture." Billy Collins, former poet laureate
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"In this intriguing reflection...both art and science are freshly conceived." Howard Gardner
About the Author
Jonah Lehrer, age twenty-five, 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 studied with Hermione Lee at Oxford. He has coauthored a peer-reviewed paper in Genetics and worked as a line cook at Melisse (in Los Angeles) and at Le Cirque 2000, and as a prep cook at Le Bernardin. As a journalist he has profiled Brian Greene and Elizabeth Gould, spent several days in the kitchen of the Fat Duck, and recorded bird songs and ruminated on Stravinsky for National Public Radio. He has written for Nature, NPR, NOVA, ScienceNow, and the MIT Technology Review, and writes a highly regarded blog known as the Frontal Cortex.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents:
Prelude ix
1. Walt Whitman
The Substance of Feeling 1
2. George Eliot
The Biology of Freedom 25
3. Auguste Escoffier
The Essence of Taste 53
4. Marcel Proust
The Method of Memory 75
5. Paul Cézanne
The Process of Sight 96
6. Igor Stravinsky
The Source of Music 120
7. Gertrude Stein
The Structure of Language 144
8. Virginia Woolf
The Emergent Self 168
Coda 190
Acknowledgments 199
Notes 201
Bibliography 216
Index 231