Proust was a Neuroscientist explores the sometimes curious relationship between art and science. In each chapter, author Jonah Lehrer reveals how a particular artist—Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cézanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf—anticipated later discoveries by neuroscientists. Simultaneously, Lehrer considers how the artists themselves were influenced by scientific thinking at the time. Even if science isn’t your cup of tea, Lehrer’s insights into the artists’ goals, thought processes, and influences should prove fascinating.
This relationship is, particular, a familial one, because we know that his parents where too kynds of intelectuals.scientific (father) and artistic (mother). But in his book, the scientific instrument is used for a more material way of understanding, the subtil mechanism is achieved by sensibility, fact wich is described by Marcel Proust in a preface ( Jean Santeuil I suppose) as the ultimate intelectual apparatus wich leads human to understanding, namely truth.