快猫短视频

JONAH LEHRER is a Columbia graduate and Rhodes Scholar, who found out the hard way that any clever young man who works as a technician in a neuroscience lab 鈥渁mplifying, vortexing, pipetting, sequencing, digesting and so on鈥�, is likely to wind up dirt poor as well as frustrated.

Now 25, Lehrer is an editor-at-large for Seed, the superglossy magazine set up by another escapee from ill-paid drudgery in the service of the life sciences, Adam Bly. Montreal-born Bly was recruited at age 16 by the National Research Council of Canada. After three years working on the role of cell adhesion in metastasis, he transformed himself into a media tycoon. His laudable aim has been demonstrating, by combining up-market advertising with readable science reporting, that 鈥渟cience is culture鈥�. After 12 issues (the first in November 2005), the Seed magazine management, based in New York, is still slow to process subscriptions and slower to ship the product. Bly鈥檚 heart seems to be in the non-print activities of the Seed Media Group, which, however, cannot enjoy comparable ad revenue. Try as I might I have not found out where the money, so difficult of access for actual scientists, to support Bly鈥檚 passion for science and advocacy of science literacy worldwide can be coming from.

Bly is clearly brilliant and Lehrer no less so. In Proust was a Neuroscientist he has provided a practical demonstration of how science is culture, by writing a scientist鈥檚 appreciation of the understanding of scientific issues manifested in the work of Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul C茅zanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. Lehrer succeeds in large measure, which is far more than could have been expected.

His accounts of some of the more complex aspects of brain physiology and function are clear and vivid, unblurred by the usual oversimplifications and misleading analogies. For example, his summary of current understanding of prions is surprising and delightful in equal measure.

Where one does find the hairs erecting on the back of the neck is when he attempts to establish the cultural contexts of his chosen giants. There Lehrer鈥檚 hypotheses remain untested, many of them far more contentious than his encyclopaedic approach allows him to imagine: for example, he describes pragmatism as a 鈥渦niquely American philosophy鈥�.

The point of Lehrer calling his book Proust was a Neuroscientist is, of course, that Proust was no such thing. In his account of Proust鈥檚 enactment of his misremembering in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Lehrer sets out an elegant display of current thinking about the biology of memory formation, showing that in his pattern of intermittent recall and constant revision, Proust anticipated what modern neuroscience would discover about the way we remember things.

鈥淧roust anticipated neuroscience on the way we remember鈥�

Lehrer does not seem to suspect that if he had used another example, say, Laurence Sterne鈥檚 Tristram Shandy, he might have noticed a similar congruence. What artists tend to know about is not the brain, but the mind, although Lehrer has almost as much difficulty with that concept (鈥渢he mind is made of fragments鈥�, he writes) as he does with the notion of soul.

As for the self, he is sometimes quite wrong, as when he explains suicide as the disintegration of self. He might also be surprised to learn that the 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne had already discussed the way that memory is contoured by both forgetting (濒鈥檕耻产濒颈) and invention, but few New Yorkers are going to buy a book called Montaigne was a Neuroscientist. Proust is by no means the first unreliable narrator in literature; in real life there is no other kind. The only narrators who are entirely reliable are the ones who are making it up. A text is always more durable than its referent, but it is also the fate of all texts (including the genetic code) to be misunderstood.

Proust was a Neuroscientist is a young man鈥檚 book: its audacity is sometimes irritating and its certainties sometimes merciless. Each essay tries to end on an inspirational note, only to flounder in bathos. In the last paragraph of the Coda, we find Lehrer expressing the hope that his book 鈥渉as shown how art and science might be reintegrated into an expansive critical sphere鈥�, only to conclude: 鈥淏oth art and science can be useful, and both can be true.鈥� Such a clever book deserves a cleverer ending.