[ExI] LA Times Book Review: Proust Was A Neuroscientist

[PJ Manney]

Turns out some of those 'creatives' weren't so wrong-headed after all.  ;-)

PJ

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-bk-cohen28oct28,0,7858653.story?coll=la-books-headlines

>From the Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
'Proust Was a Neuroscientist' by Jonah Lehrer
A science journalist discovers intuitions of recent advances in neuroscience.
By Jesse Cohen

October 28, 2007

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Jonah Lehrer

Houghton Mifflin: 242 pp., $24

Thanks to advances in neuroscience, a new model of the brain has
emerged: dynamic, plastic, constantly regenerating and reorganizing
itself, processing stimuli with such creative virtuosity that it's
hard to tell where reality ends and our mental translation of it
begins. Optical illusions, in which the brain creates shapes, colors
and movement absent in the images, are but one example.

Jonah Lehrer, a science journalist with a neuroscience background,
argues in "Proust Was a Neuroscientist" that this model is not as new
as it seems. I mean no disrespect when I say his book is itself
something of an optical illusion -- one of those figure/ground
affairs, like the two profiles that vanish when the vase between them
appears. Looked at one way, "Proust Was a Neuroscientist" is a lucid
summary of the brain as seen by contemporary neuroscience; looked at
again, it is an inspired interpretation of the work of eight 19th and
20th century artists and writers whose insights, Lehrer claims,
anticipated our current understanding. In lesser hands, this argument
would be merely tendentious, but Lehrer's command of his material is
so complete that he persuasively makes his case with scientific acuity
and aesthetic sensitivity.

He starts with Walt Whitman, whose "central poetic idea" was that
"body and mind are inseparable. . . . We do not have a body, we are a
body." Mind/body duality is an illusion, and not just for Whitman.
Lehrer offers as examples the phenomenon of "phantom limbs" (reported
by amputees) and the research of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio into
how "from our muscles we steal our moods."

Lehrer next turns to George Eliot, who rebelled against the scientific
positivism of her time: the belief that everything, including human
behavior, could be reduced to a set of physical laws and subject to
accurate prediction. Lehrer sees Eliot as anticipating two scientific
paradigms: neurogenesis (the continuous, lifelong generation of new
brain cells) and the idea that our DNA "makes us without determining
us."

Lehrer, who has also worked in four-star restaurant kitchens, deems
Auguste Escoffier an artist as well, one who intuited concepts now
central to our ideas of taste. He served his dishes piping hot to
better release their aromas, and we now know that the sense of smell
is 90% of taste; his long-simmering stocks and sauces were rich in the
flavor recent research has identified as l-glutamate, the fifth of our
taste receptors; and he offered varied menus to accommodate different
preferences, though presumably unaware that "the human olfactory
cortex, the part of the brain that interprets information from the
tongue and nose, is . . . free to arrange itself around the content of
our individual experiences."

As for Proust, his insights go beyond the observation that memory is
bound to physical sensation (yes, that madeleine). The Proustian
narrator "is constantly altering his remembered descriptions of things
and people. . . . In any other novel, such sloppiness would be
considered a mistake. But in ["In Search of Lost Time"], the
instability and inaccuracy of memory is the moral." As Proust
suspected, our creative brains constantly revise our memories:
"[E]very time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the
memory is delicately transformed."

Paul Cézanne tried to grasp the image before the brain's tidy
repackaging of it. He "broke the laws of painting in order to reveal
the laws of seeing." Gertrude Stein's grammatical but seemingly
meaningless prose points to Noam Chomsky's deep structure: "[E]very
language -- from English to Cantonese -- [is] the same. . . .
[sharing] a universal grammar built into the brain." And Virginia
Woolf, who chronicled so precisely her characters' shifting yet stable
sense of self, leads right to the latest theory of consciousness. "For
Woolf . . . the self is an illusion. . . . Modern neuroscience is now
confirming the self Woolf believed in. We invent ourselves out of our
own sensations."

Only in his discussion of Igor Stravinsky does Lehrer fail to
convince. Not that he stumbles in describing the music; indeed, he
shows the same mastery here as elsewhere. Still, he overstates his
case, arguing that the dissonances and fractured rhythms introduced in
"The Rite of Spring" have rewired our brains to accept new sounds:
"Pretty noises are boring. Music is only interesting when it confronts
us with tension, and the source of tension is conflict. Stravinsky's
insight was that what the audience really wanted was to be denied what
it wanted." So apt was this insight that "the same symphony that once
caused a violent riot became the clichéd example of modern music." The
lesson is that our brains need the new to expand; once we've absorbed
one set of sounds, we need to continue exploring. If we have truly
absorbed Stravinsky, though, why does Schoenberg still raise hackles?
Popular music is not harmonically or rhythmically challenging to the
ear, yet it's the dominant soundscape of our time.

In a "Coda," Lehrer rather dismayingly calls for a movement of writers
and artists to "ignore arbitrary intellectual boundaries" and "take a
pragmatic view of the truth," judging it "not by its origins but in
terms of its usefulness. What does this novel or experiment or poem or
protein teach us about ourselves? How does it help us to understand
who we are? What long-standing problem has it solved?"

Oh, dear, a program. So much for Oscar Wilde's claim that "All art is
quite useless." Wilde's vision may be extreme -- but still, one wants
to ask, can't a work of art, sometimes, just be beautiful?

Lehrer is, astonishingly, only 25, and may not realize that his
powerful intellect hardly needs the protection of a brigade of
artist/scientist/pragmatist hybrids. In enlarging our understanding of
eight artists while teaching us how brains work (and enlarging our
understanding of brains by teaching us how those artists worked), he's
produced what his modernist heroes also sought: a liberating new way
to see the world. His book marks the arrival of an important new
thinker, who finds in the science and the arts wonder and beauty, and
with equal confidence says wise and fresh things about both. *

Jesse Cohen is the series editor of "The Best American Science Writing."