About the Book

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 C?zanne 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.

Product Details

Media: Compact Disc Audio Product

Language: English

Publisher: Brilliance Corporation

Edition: Unknown

ISBN-10: 1455840270

Publication Date: Apr. 1st, 2012

ISBN-13: 9781455840274

Dimensions: 5.10 x 7.00 x 1.40 inches

Shipping Weight: 0.35 lbs

• Categories: General Art General Science