• Proust Was a Neuroscientist

  • By: Jonah Lehrer
  • Narrated by: Dan John Miller
  • Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (350 ratings)

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Proust Was a Neuroscientist  By  cover art

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

By: Jonah Lehrer
Narrated by: Dan John Miller
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Publisher's summary

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.

©2008 Jonah Lehrer (P)2008 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

What listeners say about Proust Was a Neuroscientist

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Interesting links between artists and the science

I really enjoyed this book - kind of a different look at what some of our most famous artists (cuisine, music, literature) were attempting in their work - and how they were coming close to uncovering, consciously or not, some of the mysteries of the brain and human perception. I first heard about this book while listening to back episodes of Radiolab – Specifically the show entitled Musical Language.

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2 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Enjoyable book

A great flashback to the past! I enjoyed the book and didn't want it to end.

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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Good Science Bad Interpretation

The book is one big logical fallacy. To do scientific research and find out how the brain functions is great. However, taking this research then going back in time and finding some vague similarities to some artist then giving them credit for the discovery is absurd.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

We don't need a new definition of neuroscience ...

Very interesting attempt of reconciliating science and art. However, being a neuroscientist myself, I am rather dissapointed. I was looking forward to interesting insights/discussion, bringing both fields closer together. Instead, it seems like the author would like to make a point out of that artists/artisans are smart ( of course they are)and science can only hope to finally prove what the artists knew all along...
I enjoyed listening and the book is both well written and read. thanks, I really appreciate it!

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21 people found this helpful

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    out of 5 stars

Pity about the narrator

Fascinating book, disastrous narrator.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

behind bad

a pretentious little disgraced writer who attempted to be more than he was
every word of the book reveals this. do not buy this horrid drivel of a book!!!!

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