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Loading... Proust Was a Neuroscientistby Jonah Lehrer
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Really fascinating book, I think I'll have to go back and listen to the whole thing again. Lehrer brings together so many disparate fields and explains them so clearly. I just loved every chapter but especially those on music and art. He explains why we hate the avante guarde and then learn to love it, why music touches us and so many other things. (  ) caz4562000 | Sep 25, 2009 |  {This review is being written several months after finishing the book.} The author's main thesis is that many people in the arts "knew" aspects of human nature that are only recently being scientifically proved by neuroscientists. I believe the author makes a very good case and provides many interesting facts and summaries of recent results in neuroscience and also the artists (Whitman, Eliot, Escoffier, Proust, Cezanne Stravinsky, Stein, and Woolf). ( ) willyt | Jul 28, 2009 | Thesis is silly. But it's an okay collection of ruminations on science and culture. I think the writer and the readers would be better off if Lehrer hadn't pretended he was making an extended argument about art anticipating science, or whatever. leeinaustin | Dec 19, 2008 | Pros: a very good angle; interesting writing; a broad range of knowledge Cons: it fades off from the middle of each chapter; not much original materials and insights compared to what the author has set off for from the beginning; becoming another history book of the both worlds (art/science) rather than real synergy insights; the attack on pinker and etc. in the last chapter is not convincing at all (the biggest let down of the book). ( ) sphinx | Jul 17, 2008 | A very interesting book that is also very well-written. At the end of the day though it was too long winded for me to get really engrossed in it. (  ) pescatello | Jan 2, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0618620109, Hardcover)Amazon Significant Seven, December 2007: Proust may have been more neurasthenic than neuroscientist, but Jonah Lehrer argues in Proust Was a Neuroscientist that he (and many of his fellow artists) made discoveries about the brain that it took science decades to catch up with (in Proust's case, that memory is a process, not a repository). Lehrer weaves back and forth between art and science in eight graceful portraits of artists (mostly writers, along with a chef, a painter, and a composer) who understood, better at times than atomizing scientists, that truth can begin with "what reality feels like." Sometimes it's the art that's most evocative in his tales, sometimes the science: Lehrer writes about them with equal ease and clarity, and with a youthful confidence that art and science, long divided, may yet be reconciled. --Tom Nissley(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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