Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Jonah Lehrer

Language: English

Pages: 256

ISBN: 0547085907

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


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 debut, 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 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 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. It’s the ultimate tale of art trumping science.
More broadly, Lehrer shows that there’s a cost to reducing 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 other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect.

The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology)

The Brain and the Meaning of Life

Neuroimmunity: A New Science That Will Revolutionize How We Keep Our Brains Healthy and Young

The Scientific American: Brave New Brain: How Neuroscience, Brain-Machine Interfaces, Neuroimaging, Psychopharmacology, Epigenetics, the Internet, ... and Enhancing the Future of Mental Power

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Grass with a new epigraph, written in death's shadow: Come, said my soul, Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one). These two poignant lines, the first lines in the last version of his only book of poetry, represent the distilled essence of Whitman's philosophy. We are the poem, his poem says, that emerges from the unity of the body and the mind. That fragile unity—this brief parenthesis of being—is all we have. Celebrate it. Chapter 2 George Eliot The Biology of.

Preface to Middlemarch, "the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than anyone would imagine." Like the discovery of neurogenesis and neural plasticity, the discovery that biology thrives on disorder is paradigm-shifting. The more science knows about life's intricacies, about how DNA actually builds proteins and about how proteins actually build us, the less life resembles a Rolex. Chaos is everywhere. As Karl Popper once said, life is not a clock, it is a.

Writer what experimentation is for the scientist"), only the artist was able to describe reality as it was actually experienced. Proust was confident that every reader who read his novel would "recognize in his own self what the book says ... This will be the proof of its veracity." Proust learned to believe in the strange power of art from the philosopher Henri Bergson.* When Proust began writing the Search, Bergson was becoming a celebrity. The metaphysician sold out opera halls, the.

Friendship was founded upon their shared sense of isolation. Both were exiles from the academic style of the time, which had made Ingres into a god and talent synonymous with fine-grained resolution. Pissarro and Cézanne had neither the temperament nor the patience for such art. Pissarro was a friendly anarchist and recommended burning down the Louvre, while Cézanne—speaking of his early painting instructors—declared, "Teachers are all castrated bastards and assholes. They have no guts." Alone.

Henry's literary philosophy reflected William's psychology. In his 1890 textbook The Principles of Psychology, William declared that "language works against our perception of the truth." Words make reality seem as if it is composed of discrete parts—like adjectives, nouns, and verbs—when in actual experience, all these different parts run together. William liked to remind his readers that the world is a "big blooming buzzing confusion," and that the neat concepts and categories we impose on our.

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