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Proust was a Neuroscientist Notes & Reflection

Now that I'm done reading Proust Was a Neuroscientist, I'm going to try to gather my thoughts and reactions and write up little reviews for several of the chapters.

My overall reaction:

I really enjoyed reading this book. Jonah Lehrer is a storyteller, and he's good at it. He waxes poetic about Walt Whitman's discoveries of the connection between the body and mind, describes Vygotsky's music and Cezanne's paintings with such eloquence that the reader can basically hear and see their art while reading. And while I definitely got a lot out of the philosophical discussions and ideas presented in the book, there was some odd disconnect throughout the novel - especially in the chapters where Lehrer is talking about literature (Whitman, Stein, etc.). I think that disconnect is there because the "evidence" Lehrer uses from each to support his claims - for Whitman it was that Lehrer summarizes each writer's body of work into one specific theme or idea that isn't representative of their work as a whole.

Each chapter in this book has a very similar structure: science is depicted as a series of set facts, undisputable truths. Then along comes an artist whose ideas run completely contrary to popular science, but Lehrer portrays their ideas as undoubtably correct (confirmation bias possibly?), and (surprise!) it turns out they were correct all along, so they basically made these discoveries before science did.

Another things is that Lehrer, like many scientists, has points - hypotheses - and he understandable what to prove them. Consequently, a lot of his 'evidence' is cherry-picked and a bit weak... especially with the literary chapters. Lehrer tries to use the main theme that he himself condensed and 'translated' from a much larger body of work as evidence to prove, for example, that Proust understood the inner workings of the brain, or that Gertrude Stein discovered the hidden underlying structure of language.

Alright, I'll get right into my reflections on four of the chapters; chapter I (Whitman and the Substance of Feeling), chapter IV (Proust and the Method of Memory), chapter VI (Stravinsky and the Source of Music), and chapter VII (Stein and the Structure of Language).

WALT WHITMAN

Lehrer opens the novel with accounts of Whitman and some of his fellow transcendentalists, and explains Whitman's central poetic belief that the mind and the body were connected, inseperable, that through the joint experiences of the mind and body, the soul was created. This chapter immediately dives into the I-function concept. The self. The whole "who am I??" debate. Whitman's burgeoning ideas popped up right in the middle of the dualism theory years that were started by Renee Descartes. During that time period, people believed that the mind and body were separate, that the mind created the "substance of feeling" and was therefore the location of the true "self", while the body was simply a vessel. Whitman's beliefs ran completely contrary to the theory of dualism, and people did not accept them. That refusal to accept the new and the different harkens to the Vygotsky chapter - Lehrer explains that the brain likes what it can trust, patterns that it's comfortable with. So when it comes across something new and strange, it immediately doesn't like it, because it can't identify those patterns. That's also why many people don't want to accept new scientific discoveries, why people choose religion over science, and why cognitive dissonance (heyy AP Psychology term!) is so common. However, science eventually began to prove Whitman’s revelations to be true, with experiments proving that “the body was the source of feelings. The flesh was not a part of what we felt, it was what we felt” (17).

MARCEL PROUST

Marcel Proust explored the “method of memory”. This chapter really caught my attention because Lehrer talked about processes at the neuronal level, which is one of the topics I want to learn about. So a memory is basically just a pattern of activity across a bunch of neurons, following specific connections. Those connections between these neurons, those synapses, are constantly changing... so it follows that memory has an odd type of permanence. Any sensations that trigger this pattern of activity, like taste of a Madeleine, can send a "rush of new neurotransmitters to the neurons representing [that memory]" (94), which can then activate a CPEB prion to affect the neighboring dendrites. A CPEB prion is a protein that exists in two states: active and inactive. The structure of the protein can be changed by neurotransmitters, activating it and allowing it to mark a dendritic branch as a memory. So the dendritic branches and connections between neurons become malleable every time we remember something, and liable to change... so memory is unreliable. Because prions can change form, “every time we conjure up our pasts, the branches of our recollections become malleable again. While the prions that mark our memories are virtually immoral, their dendritic details are always being altered” (94). Memories are specific, changeable patterns of neuronal activity; action potentials are all-or-nothing, neurons are isolated from each other, but the “empty” spaces between them allow for neuronal malleability and connection. Proust’s writing about memory described this scientific reality, as he believed people actually experienced it.

IGOR STRAVINSKY

Stravinsky also explored the malleability of our neuronal connections through his music. Though, I doubt that he set out with the express purpose of proving that... he, like most artists, probably just made his music. But ultimately, what his The Rite of Spring showed was that our perception of what is "beautiful" or "good" music changes often. As Lehrer says, “he realized that our sense of prettiness is malleable, and that the harmonies we worship and the tonic chords we trust are not sacred…music is nothing but a sliver of sound that we have learned how to hear” (123). Music is basically separate pitches or wave frequencies (AP Physics is now following me everywhere oh god) melted into a pattern, and once our brain identifies that pattern it learns to predict what notes should come next. It likes those patterns specifically because it knows them; the connections between the neurons have already been made... so we're basically learning to like the music. And when the brain gets sent patterns it doesn't recognize, it rejects them. But, if listened to enough, those new patterns become learned, and we begin to like that new music. Stravinsky's radical piece of music proves this, that neural connections are malleable. When The Rite of Spring made its debut, the crowd revolted, hurling insults at the musicians, at their fellow audience members, etc. I find that absolutely hilarious - an entire theater of high-class people dissolving into a mass riot. However, within a few years, Stravinsky's ballet began to be accepted and eventually the discordant piece was met with standing ovations. And this applies to other senses, not only to sound. I'm guessing the same process goes on in our brains when we try a new food. The more we eat it, the more we like it? That's something to add to my 'look up on Google' list.

GERTRUDE STEIN

This was one of the hardest chapters for me to get through in this book, even though it was fascinating. The basic premise of this chapter is that language is innate. It's kind of similar to the concept from the Stravinsky chapter, with neural connections being malleable and the brain constantly trying to make sense of random sensations. So when we apply that to language, we find that understanding language is basically finding patterns in random sounds. And we have an innate concept of language that lets us construct words and communicate. We identify specific sounds - specific chunks of words - and can use that to identify and construct words.

All in all, this chapter was a bit fuzzy for me. I understood the point that Lehrer was trying to get across, but I was a bit confused why he used Gertrude Stein's work in particular as evidence for this idea that language is innate. While the 'innateness of language' is true, I feel like we could've gotten that anywhere. And what's more is that he didn't really analyze the meaning behind Stein's work or speculate why she wrote what she wrote (at least, he didn't analyze it any farther than using it to support his own conclusions) and that's a real loss because Stein's work is so multi-layered and can provide us a lot more insight into language and communication than what Lehrer used it for.

CONCLUSION?

One of the main things I got from this book is that artistic expression and its effect on thought and cognition is years ahead of current scientific capabilities. We have no idea what's going on in the brain in relation to creativity and improvisation (this relates directly to my previous post on Charles Limb's Ted Talk: The Brain on Improv), but art might give us a window into those inner workings before science does..

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