Jonah Lehrer is another one.There's this recurring quality I've found among some of the people I've been reading lately - an uncanny ability to distill the work and thoughts of world-changing geniuses into concepts I can appreciate and understand. Jonah Lehrer is one of those people. (I have to admit, though, most of them are people I initially heard on Radiolab).
His book Proust was a Neuroscientist, sounds overly intimidating.
Don't be intimidated. Even though it includes both the name of a long dead French author and the name of a notoriously complicated branch of science, isn't hard to enjoy.
The book compares the works of artists and finds connections between their work and a scientific field. One of my favorite examples is between Cezanne and our scientific understanding of human sight.
Cezanne is one of those names that I felt I should k
now, but wouldn't be able to say anything intelligent about until this book. I've pasted one of his paintings, titled Green Apples, to the right.He was an artist who had to deal with the coming of photography, and knew that painting had to change. The old school was to make everything look as real as possible, but photography would soon be able to beat out the work of any human hand. Cezanne decided to do something different. His art, like the painting on the right, is kind of blurry...almost incomplete. When you look at that painting you can make out the apples, but that's not the point. The point is that he makes you interpret the work - the broad strokes that imply the apples are there, without simply showing them to you. Our brain resolves the blurry image on it's own, and clarifies it into a clear concept: apples on a table.
He could have made it look like a photograph, remember, this is one of the most talented painters of his day. If he wanted, they could've looked just like a photo. He didn't though - he left just enough clues for our brains to resolve this blurry canvas into a clear concept.
Turns out, many years later, scientists learned that this is how the brain works too. The brain doesn't resolve everything with crystal clarity immediately - it actually sends two images down two different neural pathways...one of them is fast, and one is slow. Lehrer explains:
The fast pathway quickly transmits a coarse and blurry picture to our prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in conscious thought. Meanwhile, the slow pathway takes a meandering route through the visual cortex...Why does the mind see everything twice? Because our visual cortex needs help. After the prefrontal cortex receives its imprecise picture, the "top" of the brain quickly decides what the "bottom" has seen and begins doctoring the sensory data. Form is imposed onto the formless rubble...the outside world is forced to conform to our expectations. If these interpretations are removed, our reality becomes unrecognizable. The light just isn't enough.You've likely encountered something similar before: at a magic show. You know that what you've seen isn't possible, and magic hasn't been proven to exist. Yet, when you watch David Copperfield or Criss Angel, the reason you're so stunned is because the two pathways of your vision are giving you conflicting information. 'That couldn't have happened,' and 'I just saw that happen' go through your brain at the same time...and you're stuck, dumbfounded, trying to resolve the two.
The pinpoint observations brought to light by other famous artists mentioned in the book are just as astonishing. Igor Stravinsky (yep, another one of those guys whose name I know, but don't know squat about) composed a symphony that led to rioting the first time it was performed. He played with the human brain's desire to find a complete a pattern in music...by removing all the patterns. By taking out the patterns, he affected people on a very primal level.
Getrude Stein (yeah...I got nothin' on that one, actually..I'd never heard of her) wrote these obnoxiously long poems that didn't make any sense...but in doing so broke down the laws of grammar and syntax. A study of deaf people in Nicaragua found that people are innately wired to use certain rules in language. (Turns out deaf people in Nicaragua had no form of communication - they were isolated and abandoned into crowded orphanages. The first school for the deaf was formed in there in the 80's and a makeshift language of signs sprang up. Linguists found it followed the same rules of languages from all over the planet, though the people creating it had no exposure to anything else. The whole story is fascinating.)
The world can't be described just in the sounds and strokes of art and music...nor can it be described by the theories and equations of scientists. Our experience in this world is made up of a combination of the two. The emotions we feel and the facts we gather join together to make up our reality. Neither of them alone can fully describe our lives as they really are.
A great book lets you see the world in a new and novel way...Lehrer does exactly that. He's the nerdy guy you'd wanna have a beer with. Reading his book was a worthwhile substitute...not to mention it means two beers for me!
