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The idea for this delightful book actually arose when Jonah Lehrer happer ed to be reading Proust while working on memory in the lab of the neuroscientist Erik Kandel. He suddenly realized that Proust's
book was more than just a story, it related to Lehrer's work. Proust had anticipated the problems of memory, which his experiments were all about. This book is about art as well as science trying to understand human experience. There is no discipline other than psychoanalysis that better embodies such mutual endeavor. Are we science or art? This is a question we have lived with since our beginning, most of us hoping we are both. The dramatic quality of the tale effecting both the artist and the scientist is due to a second theme of two opposing forces: the need for or the compulsion to create order, so we can function with some reliability, and the way in which nature injects randomness, variation, flexibility, diversity, and malleability; a theme of the conservative forces defending the stability and certainty of what was thought to be true, and the avant-garde pushing to open up boundaries. Lehrer regrets the tendency of our culture to give more weight to the truth of science and underestimate the truth of experience, which is most often captured by the artist. Art and science are equal partners in this endeavor to understand the mysteries of life.
The book highlights the work of eight artists who intuited a truth which science was able to confirm at a later time. Lehrer's portrayal of the artists has the sensitive touch of an art historian, and his reporting on the latest scientific research reveals his easy familiarity with this field. These accomplishments become even more impressive when we are told that Lehrer, a journalist, is 25 years old and a Rhodes Scholar who worked, as I mentioned, for a while in the lab of Erik Kandel. He co-authored a peer-reviewed paper on genetics and as a hobby enjoyed haute cuisine working as a line cook in various well-known est