Proust Was a Neuroscientist
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- ISBN13: 9780547085906
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Taking a group of artists a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists Lehrer shows how each one learned an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot learned the brain’s malleability; how the French chef Escoffier learned 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 additional linguists. It’s the essential tale of art trumping science.
More broadly, Lehrer shows that there’s a cost to sinking everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and art knows this better than science does. 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 additional, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect.
Amazon.com Review
Amazon 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). Lehrer weaves back and into the world 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 scientists, that truth can start with “what reality feels like.” Sometimes it’s the art that’s most evocative in his tales, sometimes the science: Lehrer writes about them with equal ease and clarity, and with a young confidence that art and science, long divided, may yet be reconciled. –Tom Nissley
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A fantastic read with a fascinating premise. Just a few facts need checking. For example, on p. 3, Lehrer writes that “[t]he tale of the brain’s separation from the body starts with Rene Descartes… [who] divided being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass.” In fact, the soul-body separation was a feature of Western thought long before Descartes, especially in Christianity (reflect St. Augustine and the so-called desires of the flesh). Fortunately, a few slips here and there don’t detract from the main argument of the book.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
For years I have been waiting for this kind of development showing that the arts, including litterature, and science are not foreign to each additional.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Appealing and relaxing read. Pick it up and place it down anytime.
Sometimes too cererbral with detailed scientific explanations but you can skip these and not miss the point.
Comparisons between art and science.
My favorite is the food and wine part.
Excellent material for dinner conversations. Makes me sound like an practiced.
Fun book.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Inane, anachronistic title aside, books like this go to show the desperate lengths people will go to make money off insubstantial, pseudo-intellectual fodder–as if the insights of Proust, couched as they are in his rich prose, could be cut-rate to the idioms of a dismal science in its infancy. America is a fantastic country, but by providing a leisurely environment for so many uninspired individuals, academia has become so competitive that students and graduates are cut-rate to drawing ridiculous theses if they are to take an original stance on a agreed theme. If you really want to know humanity, read Proust. If you want to read a book that tries to capitalize off remarkable achievements in the study of humanity (like Proust’s novel) lacking building an original or insightful contribution, read this. There’s so many books to be read in one’s life and such small time… choose wisely.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I received this book within 36 hrs of ordering it with no extra charge for shipping.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5