Seeking Insights Into the Human Mind in Art and Science

Proust Was a Neuroscientist
BY JONAH LEHRER
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN, 2007
230 PAGES

Reviewed by Steven Rose, Ph.D.
About Steven Rose, Ph.D.

From The Dana Foundation: Proust was a neuroscientist? No, despite Jonah Lehrer’s provocative title, the novelist Marcel Proust was not.

Proust’s seven-volume novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (English translations are titled either Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), published between 1913 and 1927, is a profound meditation on the nature of emotional and sensual memory and the complex interpersonal relationships of a decadent aristocracy and a rising bourgeoisie. Researchers studying memory will almost certainly be aware of the famous passage, early on in the first volume, where the taste of a madeleine cake evokes in Proust’s semi-autobiographical narrator an entire ensemble of childhood memories, as it is one of the few references to the work of a novelist to find its way regularly into neuroscience textbooks. But while Proust was profoundly introspective and focused on his own thoughts and feelings, his concern with the bodily mechanisms that underlay them was almost certainly confined to medical consultations about his perennially poor health.

Lehrer’s title thus reflects both the ambitious goals of his book and their limitations. His thesis, presented in a series of eight case studies, is that through the 19th and early 20th centuries, writers, painters, musicians, and even cooks achieved insights into the mind that both contradicted the assumptions of the sciences of their time and anticipated some of the understanding of the brain that modern neuroscience offers. It’s a fun and thought-provoking argument, even though I feel that at times his case remains at best non-proven.

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