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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. ( ){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). 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. 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). 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. no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400)
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