Proust Was a Neuroscientist--A Review

In Jonah Lehrer's debut book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, he describes how art discovered how the brain works long before science got around to it.

By exploring the works of Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Wolf, Lehrer explains how these artists anticipated the discoveries of science--how we remember, how we experience flavor, how visual perception is processed by the brain.

Jonah Lehrer has an interesting background. He is a graduate of Columbia University, a Rhodes Scholar, a contributer to Wired, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR (among others). He's worked in the lab of Nobel-prize winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel and in the kitchens of prominent chefs in New York City.

This varied background has enabled him to examine science and art together and give us a well-researched and well-written look into how art and science are connected, how they compliment and inform each other. Lehrer is a gifted writer, taking subject matter that has great potential to confuse and lose a casual reader (basics of neuroscience, physics, etc.) and turning them into poetry.

Lehrer creates a very convincing argument for the pairing of art and science to better understand the world around us and, more importantly, ourselves.