It’s a cliché, but true: man has mapped the surface of the dark side of the moon without ever fully charting his own mind. Yet that’s changing.
New machines offer tests like the PET scan, which allow neuroscientists to plot patterns of electrical impulses within the brain, identifying the regions where particular types of thought arise. DNA sequencing has shown parts of the mind’s genetic code. Cognitive psychologists have proven the fundamental unreliability of all memory and begun to grasp some of the means by which we interpret the stimuli of our senses.
But in his engaging new book “Proust Was A Neuroscientist,” novice book writer Jonah Lehrer argues that the excitement and opportunity provided by this latest scientific revolution should not blind us to its inherent limitations. After all, science can never fully comprehend us in all our varied, shifting and multitudinous nature. Indeed, Lehrer argues scientific understanding is only following on the heels of certain great artists who’ve inferentially grasped the fundamental problems of understanding how we think, feel and learn. Science, he says, must be a complement to the wisdom of the arts.
To elucidate his ideas, Lehrer reviews the lives of five writers – Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf – along with painter Paul Cezanne, composer Igor Stravinsky and the great French chef Auguste Escoffier.
Each story relates to current neuroscience. Thus, a discussion of Woolf leads to the recent discovery that some blind people possess “blindsight”: they have perfectly functioning eyes, but, because of lesions in a region called the V1 part of the mind, they lack brain function to process the images.
Legendary psychologist William James developed some of his mind-body theories indirectly from Walt Whitman’s experiences as a nurse treating amputees during the Civil War. And in the account of Escoffier’s career, we learn that the nose has more than 350 distinct genetically prepared nasal receptors. Since what we consider taste is more than 90 percent a consequence of smell, hot food, being richer in aroma, generally tastes better – frequently even when it’s less juicy or tender.
Lehrer also offers well-chosen details for color. When Gertrude Stein attended Johns Hopkins Medical School, one teacher said, “Either I am crazy or Miss Stein is.”
Lehrer’s best chapters deal with his most accomplished subjects. His weakest is on the tedious, self-aggrandizing Stein and the self-promoting academic Noam Chomsky. The latter is praised for his tautological theories on language, which purport to prove that grammatical structures, being universal, are genetically endowed. (One wonders since ghosts are reported in all countries, is belief in them a universally inherited trait, too?)
In all though this is a remarkable, fun and intriguing debut: a knowing work of art about art’s meeting with the science of knowing.
Jonathan Leaf is a playwright and journalist living in Brooklyn.
Proust was a Neuroscientist
by Jonah Lehrer
Houghton Mifflin