[tt] NS: Germaine Greer reviews Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

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Germaine Greer reviews Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626316.100&print=true
* 24 November 2007
* Germaine Greer

JONAH LEHRER is a Columbia graduate and Rhodes Scholar, who found
out the hard way that any clever young man who works as a
technician in a neuroscience lab "amplifying, vortexing, pipetting,
sequencing, digesting and so on", is likely to wind up dirt poor as
well as frustrated.

Now 25, Lehrer is an editor-at-large for Seed, the superglossy
magazine set up by another escapee from ill-paid drudgery in the
service of the life sciences, Adam Bly. Montreal-born Bly was
recruited at age 16 by the National Research Council of Canada.
After three years working on the role of cell adhesion in
metastasis, he transformed himself into a media tycoon. His
laudable aim has been demonstrating, by combining up-market
advertising with readable science reporting, that "science is
culture". After 12 issues (the first in November 2005), the Seed
magazine management, based in New York, is still slow to process
subscriptions and slower to ship the product. Bly's heart seems to
be in the non-print activities of the Seed Media Group, which,
however, cannot enjoy comparable ad revenue. Try as I might I have
not found out where the money, so difficult of access for actual
scientists, to support Bly's passion for science and advocacy of
science literacy worldwide can be coming from.

Bly is clearly brilliant and Lehrer no less so. In Proust was a
Neuroscientist he has provided a practical demonstration of how
science is culture, by writing a scientist's appreciation of the
understanding of scientific issues manifested in the work of Walt
Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul
Cézanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. Lehrer
succeeds in large measure, which is far more than could have been
expected.

His accounts of some of the more complex aspects of brain
physiology and function are clear and vivid, unblurred by the usual
oversimplifications and misleading analogies. For example, his
summary of current understanding of prions is surprising and
delightful in equal measure.

Where one does find the hairs erecting on the back of the neck is
when he attempts to establish the cultural contexts of his chosen
giants. There Lehrer's hypotheses remain untested, many of them far
more contentious than his encyclopaedic approach allows him to
imagine: for example, he describes pragmatism as a "uniquely
American philosophy".

The point of Lehrer calling his book Proust was a Neuroscientist
is, of course, that Proust was no such thing. In his account of
Proust's enactment of his misremembering in A la Recherche du Temps
Perdu, Lehrer sets out an elegant display of current thinking about
the biology of memory formation, showing that in his pattern of
intermittent recall and constant revision, Proust anticipated what
modern neuroscience would discover about the way we remember
things.

Lehrer does not seem to suspect that if he had used another
example, say, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, he might have
noticed a similar congruence. What artists tend to know about is
not the brain, but the mind, although Lehrer has almost as much
difficulty with that concept ("the mind is made of fragments", he
writes) as he does with the notion of soul.

As for the self, he is sometimes quite wrong, as when he explains
suicide as the disintegration of self. He might also be surprised
to learn that the 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne
had already discussed the way that memory is contoured by both
forgetting (l'oubli) and invention, but few New Yorkers are going
to buy a book called Montaigne was a Neuroscientist. Proust is by
no means the first unreliable narrator in literature; in real life
there is no other kind. The only narrators who are entirely
reliable are the ones who are making it up. A text is always more
durable than its referent, but it is also the fate of all texts
(including the genetic code) to be misunderstood.

Proust was a Neuroscientist is a young man's book: its audacity is
sometimes irritating and its certainties sometimes merciless. Each
essay tries to end on an inspirational note, only to flounder in
bathos. In the last paragraph of the Coda, we find Lehrer
expressing the hope that his book "has shown how art and science
might be reintegrated into an expansive critical sphere", only to
conclude: "Both art and science can be useful, and both can be
true." Such a clever book deserves a cleverer ending.

Related Articles

Blue Monday, Green Thursday, by Jonah Lehrer
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19426041.300
19 May 2007

New Scientist magazine: Rembrance of things unconscious
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg13117837.300
24 August 1991

Weblinks

More details Proust was a Neuroscientist from the publisher's website 
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?textType=reviews&titleNumber=689694

Jonah Lehrer's website and blogs
http://www.jonahlehrer.com/About%20Me%202.html

E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles.