A Buffet of Insight

books:


	• Proust Was a Neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer Houghton Mifflin, 2007 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Brilliant

I'm an artist and I found this book to be extremely inspiring. Our culture has really devalued art. As the author notes, we associate art with entertainment and aesthetics. But this book is an inspiring survey of some great artists who were much more than mere entertainers. They did much more than just make pretty things. Rather, they used their art as investigations into experience and the mind. This book is a beautiful reminder that art can be an ally of science as we try to learn about human nature, how the brain works and the mystery of experience. I loved this quote from the book: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff."

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Marvelous

This is a wonderful, incredibly thought-provoking work. It will change the way you think about Proust and Cezanne and great art in general. And it will also change the way you think about your brain. He's also a great speaker!

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fabulous read

This is an imaginative, interesting read and it's worth a try if you have any interest in the link between neurology and everyday experiences of the highly creative people written about.

A Buffet of Insight

A buffet of insight, May 11, 2008
By T. Veneruso "film director" (los angeles, ca) - See all my reviews
Delicious, mouth-watering, hysterical, smart, and scientific this book is directly in sync with my idea of a great book. I laughed, I cried, and I learned A LOT!!! Thanks so much to Jonah for putting these ideas together for me. I loved the book and am gushing too much about it. I'd love to tell you things I hate about it (since it is always nice to know the reviewer was being at least somewhat critical) but honestly I learned so much that I can't think of a negative thing to write. Thanks Jonah! I don't know you but wish I did for a nice cup of tea and a tasty biscuit.
-Tara

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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.

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