[MD] Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

[david buchanan]

Craig said About Jonah Lehrer's "Proust Was A Neuroscientist," Craig said:

"This book about the relation of art & the mind is compatible with MOQ."


Ant McWatt replied:

Quite a juxtaposition in that intriguing title, Craig!  (Does that mean Oscar Wilde was an astrophysicist?  Platt a charity worker in Africa?)  Anyway, any particular wisdom in this book that actually throws light on the MOQ?



dmb says:
Jonah Lehrer was a journalist, a science journalist, until his fall from grace. He was fired - and effectively bounced out of the profession is a plagiarism scandal. Even before his cheating was discovered, his books were harshly criticized by actual scientists. 

There's an old review (11th November, 2007) of Jonah Lehrer's "Proust Was A Neuroscientist" in Slate for example. The reviewer discredits the book's main premise. Here's the premise in Jonah Lehrer's own words: "We now know that Proust was right about memory, Cezanne was uncannily accurate about the visual cortex, Stein anticipated Chomsky, and Woolf pierced the mystery of consciousness; modern neuroscience has confirmed these artistic intuitions."

The reviewer undermines this premise by pointing out that these artists weren't scientist and did not discover things things either. They were getting their ideas from elsewhere. (If memory serves, Proust was William James's brother-in-law.)

"Many of the breakthroughs attributed to the artists profiled in the book seem to have been prefigured—or even stated outright—by contemporary theorists like William James. Indeed, the architect of American psychology lurks in almost every chapter: In a discussion of Cezanne's discovery that the mind fabricates an image of the world from our sensory impressions, Lehrer quotes from James' Pragmatism, saying substantially the same thing; when he explains how Woolf discovered our splintered consciousness, it's James again, on the "mutations of the self"; a chapter on Gertrude Stein's discovery of the language instinct begins with her work in William James' laboratory at Harvard; and so on. (For a discussion of James' considerable influence on Proust, you'll have to look elsewhere.) Midway through the book, I started to wonder if a better title would have been James Was a Psychologist."

I don't if the book would illuminate the MOQ or not but this connection with James does, at least, make the idea seem plausible.