Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Name: Proust Was a Neuroscientist
Brand: Brilliance Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Jonah Lehrer
ISBN: 9781423374244

Author: Jonah Lehrer

Narrator: Dan John Miller

Unabridged: 7 hr 38 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

Published: 09/01/2008

Categories: Nonfiction, Science, Art

Synopsis

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 identified 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 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 and art to listen more closely to each other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect.

About Jonah Lehrer

JONAH LEHRER is editor at large for Seed magazine and the author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist. A graduate of Columbia University and a Rhodes Scholar, Lehrer has worked in the lab of Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel and has written for The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. He edits the "Mind Matters" blog for Scientific American, and writes his own highly regarded blog, "The Frontal Cortex."

Reviews

Goodreads review by Maria on February 14, 2014

One of my most admired scientists is Dr. Eric Kandel, not only for his research work regarding the reductionist molecular approach of how our memory works (which got him the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine in the year 2000), but also for his remarkable ability explaining in such an elegant prose how......more

Goodreads review by Tim on June 03, 2008

Proust Was a Neuroscientist turned out to be the book I'd been looking to read for a long time. Apparently there have been quite a few books prior to this one about the "third culture," the bridge between art and science (and unfortunately I've not read any of them) —Lehrer mentions E.O. Wilson's......more

Goodreads review by Jenna on February 05, 2008

The premise of this book is great, but the author fails to make good enough connections half the time. A few of the chapters are fabulous and he should have quit while he was ahead, but I suppose that would have left a short book. My advice is to only read these chapters: 3 - Auguste Escoffier and T......more

Goodreads review by K on November 25, 2009

This book appeared unsolicited in my mailbox from a bookworm friend and instantly, I could tell, I would consume it in one sitting: a slim paperback with a commercial-pop cover design, Oliver Sacks endorsement, and incongruous title-cum-slogan. Ah, yes, every nerd’s most guilty pleasure – an instant......more

Goodreads review by Salma on July 23, 2023

Lehrer worked in the Kandel lab for Dr. Kausik Si, who is known for his research on the molecular basis of memory. Dr. Si was intrigued by a paradox: the brain's cells are in constant flux and the proteins that mediate much of the brain's functions are regenerated every so often. Yet, our memories o......more