Getting the brain right
PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST
By Jonah Lehrer
256 pp. Houghton Mifflin $24
Reviewed by Steve George
“The modernists got the brain right, ” says Jonah Lehrer in this concise, elegantly written, provocative book. Stravinsky’s music, Cézanne’s painting, and the writing of George Eliot, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf shine because these artists and writers succeeded unusually well in uncovering the structure and function of the human brain. Insights in their works anticipated discoveries made by neuroscientists decades later, Lehrer believes.
At a basic level, Lehrer’s notion almost has to be true: human mental life, unless it’s complete magic, depends on brain activity. When an artistic creation engages our senses, or a novel successfully evokes a character’s mental life, in some sense that work of art or literature must be relating pretty well to the way our brains work.
Lehrer, however, intends more than such a basic truth when he refers to artists getting the brain right. What he means is that those he celebrates have managed to reveal details of actual brain anatomy and physiology. But isn’t it neuroscientists, not artists and writers, who make discoveries about brain structure and function? That artists and novelists are even implicitly engaged in the same work as neuroscientists is a controversial idea, and only a partly convincing one. Still, Jonah Lehrer has developed the idea into a book that is well worth reading.
Each of the eight chapters starts with the story of a particular artist or writer, then moves to a penetrating account of the person’s work, and finally makes intriguing links with modern neuroscientific discoveries. In the Stravinsky chapter, for example, we read about the audience that rioted during the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and about the influence Rimsky-Korsakov and Schonberg had on Stravinsky’s composing. Lehrer then analyzes the particular dissonant sounds in the piece that led to the riots. Finally he takes us through the human auditory system, from sound waves entering the ear all the way up to the cerebral cortex. The neuroscience insight is the plasticity of the cortex, the re-wiring that changes a listener’s reaction to a new, unexpected dissonance from initial disgusted rejection to eventual enjoyment.
Besides the Stravinsky story, the most convincing chapters are those on Proust, which show how his musings on memory turn out to mirror recent neuroscience findings about memory reconsolidation, and on the famous French chef Escoffier, whose creation of the perfect veal stock anticipated the discovery of a receptor for a taste called umami, meaning “delicious” in Japanese.
At the other end of the convincing scale is the analysis of free will in chapters on Walt Whitman and George Eliot. Lehrer equates free will with randomness, chaos, and indeterminism. He celebrates the brain’s alleged unpredictability. That’s questionable on two accounts. First, no one knows for sure whether the brain is or is not a deterministic system. Second, nearly three centuries of cogent arguments, beginning with David Hume’s, make a strong case that free will is not only compatible with determinism, but impossible without it.
Almost as hard for me to accept at face value are the chapters on Gertrude Stein, whose meaningless but grammatically correct prose is said to have anticipated Noam Chomsky’s linguistics, and the chapter on Paul Cézanne, whose painted lines supposedly match the properties of visual cortex neurons.
The best of the passages about neuroscience are accurate and poetic. Take Lehrer’s evocation of vibrating auditory receptor cells in the ear: “When a scale is played, the hair cells mirror the escalating notes. They sway in time with the music, deftly translating the energy of music into a spatial code of electricity.”
On the other hand, this isn’t a textbook of brain science: the author is modest about his neuroscience expertise, and indeed there are quite a few factual lapses. On page 118, for example, we read that “. . . in the lateral geniculate nucleus, the thick nerve that connects the eyeball to the brain, ten times more fibers project from the cortex to the eye than from the eye to the cortex.” In fact the geniculate isn’t a nerve, and no fibers at all project from the cortex to the eye.
A major theme of the book is the irreducibility of human experience to brain activity. The neuroscientists I know wouldn’t disagree with that point of view. A neuroscientist doing experiments on the biochemistry of memory doesn’t go into the lab every day hoping to eliminate the human experience of remembering, or thinking one could reduce that experience to a chemical reaction. Except for some well-known evolutionary biologists, who get properly chastised for their reductionism in the last chapter of the book, the same is true of most scientists in other fields. No physicist, for example, would argue that the optical explanation of a rainbow replaces the experience of seeing one.
In this engaging book, Jonah Lehrer reminds us to stay modest about what the field of neuroscience can achieve, and to venerate the insights that great artists and writers provide into the human spirit. For that, and for its beautiful writing, the book is well
worth reading.
Steve George teaches neuroscience at Amherst College, and does research on electrical signalling in the nervous system.
Tell us what you think about this review. We’ll post your comments on the blog.