By Wendy Smith,
who is the author of "Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931-1940"
Thursday, January 3, 2008; C02

PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST

By Jonah Lehrer

Houghton Mifflin. 242 pp. $24

Jonah Lehrer's smart, elegantly written little book expresses an appealing faith that art and science offer different but complementary views of the world. His main argument, that artists have often intuited essential truths about human nature that are later verified by scientific research, is hardly new. But he pursues this argument with freshness and enthusiasm in eight enjoyable case studies studded with arresting sentences that voice the 25-year-old author's delighted sense of discovery.

Lehrer has solid scientific credentials: He worked in the neuroscience lab of Nobel laureate Eric Kandel; he's been published in Nature and has written for the PBS program "Nova Science Now"; he's an editor at large for the science magazine Seed. He lucidly explains the various scientific discoveries that confirmed Marcel Proust's understanding that smell and taste are powerful triggers of memory, Igor Stravinsky's assurance that familiarity will make us appreciate music we once thought ugly, Paul C¿zanne's conviction that to truly see, "the eye is not enough. One needs to think as well." But it should be noted that these three chapters -- as well as the five others on Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf -- open and close with the artist's point of view. Lehrer's respect for science is real, and he's obviously sincere when he insists that "every humanist should read Nature." But in the end, you can't help feeling that he really thinks every neuroscientist should read Proust.

That's because the kind of science Lehrer celebrates is not an unwavering march from ignorance to enlightenment, the discovery of one eternal, universal law after another. On the contrary, it respects the messiness of experience just as art does. "Every theory is imperfect," he writes. "Scientific facts are meaningful precisely because they are ephemeral, because a new observation, a more honest observation, can always alter them." Neuroscientist Fred Gage, for example, was initially bewildered when he found that retrotransposons, "junk genes that randomly jump around the human genome," were present in unusually high numbers in brain cells, where they arbitrarily altered genetic programs. "The brain seemed intentionally destructive," as Lehrer vividly summarizes it. "But then Gage had an epiphany. He realized that all these genetic interruptions created a population of perfectly unique minds. . . . In other words, chaos creates individuality." More than a century after "Middlemarch," science was buttressing George Eliot's insistence that the mind was "not cut in marble," that human thoughts and feelings were not wholly determined by immutable biology.

From Eliot to junk genes is a characteristic train of thought in this lively text, which is impressionistic and suggestive rather than rigorous. That suits Lehrer's subjects, who are mostly modernists striving to dismantle art's conventional methods of reproducing reality and to come up with new ways of putting together sounds or words to capture our subjective experience of reality. (You have to stretch a bit to include Whitman and Eliot in this category, and French chef Escoffier simply won't fit -- again, this author isn't unduly concerned with neatness.) I'm sure that specialists in the various fields he breezes through would find some of Lehrer's summaries sketchy, some of his connections tentative if not specious. General readers, however, will be happy to be carried along on the current of his aphoristic prose: "Knowledge emerges from the litter of our mistakes"; "The Rite of Spring" is "the sound of art changing the brain"; "Memory is fallible. Our remembrance of things past is imperfect."

Lehrer closes with an update of C.P. Snow's 1959 call for the "two cultures" to learn from each other. He finds too many scientists still dismissive of anything that can't be reduced to facts and laws, too many glib postmodernist artists claiming that all truths are relative. This section, regrettably, reads like a hasty wrap-up written the night before the paper was due (the author is, after all, fairly recently out of school). Lehrer's belief that "art and science might be reintegrated into an expansive critical sphere" is better served in the intelligently entertaining chapters that precede it.