2009 Dewey Decimal Project: 700.1 L

[rsadelle]

This month's book was Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. I'd read something about the book several months ago (I have a vague recollection that it was a blog post about an interview wherein someone asked Lehrer about Kanye West, possibly either at Marginal Revolution or Mind Hacks), and when I saw it on the new books shelf at the library, I picked it up.

I'm finding it interesting how many nonfiction books are more like a collection of essays than a coherent whole; this book fits into that mold.

The basic idea behind Proust Was a Neuroscientist is that artists have anticipated many things that neuroscience is only just now realizing. It's an interesting premise, and a lot of the things artists have known before neuroscience seem somewhat like common sense.

The book was certainly interesting, although I think it might have been more interesting if I'd read more (or, rather, any) of the works he references. I think my favorite chapter was "Auguste Escoffier: The Essence of Taste," about cooks and chefs discovering that umami is real before neuroscientists found the receptors for it on the tongue. It made me hungry, and revealed why my first attempt at black beans really needed tomatoes or salsa added to it. (Tomato sauce falls in his list of "potent sources of L-glutamate.")

In the chapter "Igor Stravinsky: The Source of Music," he tells us:

Over time, the auditory cortex works the same way; we become better able to hear those sounds we have heard before. This only encourages us to listen to the golden oldies we already know (since they sound better), and to ignore the difficult songs that we don't know (since they sound harsh and noisy, and release unpleasant amounts of dopamine). We are built to abhor the uncertainty of newness.

How do we escape this neurological trap? By paying attention to art. The artist is engaged in a perpetual struggle against the positive-feedback loop of the brain, desperate to create an experience that no one has ever had before.
...
Without artists like Stravinsky who compulsively make everything new, our sense of sound would become increasingly narrow.

This makes me think I need to start listening to new music. I know I've noticed my own tendency to not bother with music I don't already know.

My favorite bits of the book are the entertaining commentaries and summaries of the works he covers. About George Eliot's Middlemarch: "Many depressing pages ensue." About Proust: "A sickly thirty-something, Proust had done nothing with his life so far except accumulate symptoms and send self-pitying letters to his mother." About Gertrude Stein: "If she is remembered today outside college campuses and histories of cubism, it is for a single cliché, one that is almost impossible to forget: 'A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.' Although Stein used this aphorism as a decoration for dinner plates, it now represents everything she wrote. This is the danger of avoiding plots."

Lehrer's concluding "Coda" is a manifesto of sorts in which Lehrer criticizes current popular science books and proposes a new way of marrying art and science: "What the artists in this book reveal is that there are many different ways of describing reality, each of which is capable of generating truth. Physics is useful for describing quarks and galaxies, neuroscience is useful for describing the brain, and art is useful for describing our actual experience." I'm not overly convinced by his argument. I think it's obvious that science and art describe different truths, and I'm not sure Lehrer's book successfully mixes art and science, although it is an interesting exercise in literary criticism by way of neuroscience.

Comments

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of this (http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/forster.html) and a short story I read by Leopoldo Lugones. sima_q leant me a book of his short stories, and each one (with, I think, one exception) involves a description of some branch of scientific study. First he introduces some characters, then he goes on describing science stuff for several pages, then he works what he was discussing into a plot that crucially depends on his understanding of the science.

One of the last stories I read in there was about an ape a "linguist" was attempting to train (this was before the term "linguist" was used, I believe). What follows (his scientific explanation) is fascinating. He says a bunch of stuff that's just way, way, way off—not even close—but which the casual reader would accept unflinchingly (which led me to wonder about the other stories involving sciences about which I knew nothing). Yet, through all that gobblety-gook, he said one thing that was mind-boggling prescient. Specifically, he mentions that Broca's area, while instructive, does not completely explain the phenomenon of language—which is true! Though for a long time a lot of Chomskyan theorists fastened on to that as the "speech center of the brain". Turns out you can still speak if that area's missing—it's only if that area is damaged in an otherwise fully-formed brain that speakers have problems. But this was published before anyone had even scanned the brain of a live human being. It was totally wild!

[rsadelle]

Huh. Lehrer holds up Ian McEwan's Saturday as a good example of blending art and science, which I also haven't read.

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

In order to avoid an overly-long comment, I decided to create a new one.

Finding new music is tough. Certain things have helped me to get into new things, though:

1. Movies often have music by artists one has never heard of. Simply watching new movies can lead to new discoveries.


2. Branching out from that, sometimes you'll know of one song on a movie soundtrack you love, so you get the soundtrack for the movie. When I've done that, I've often found other songs by other artists I've also enjoyed.


3. Ditto for television shows. Who knows but perhaps The OC, as awful as it was, turned some people on to Mazzy Star?


4. Concerts are great for this. It's rare that you go to a concert and only the band you want to see is playing. I love listening to opening acts and second and third stage bands: you never know if you'll find something you like.


5. Covers are fantastic gateway songs. Fans of band X, will listen to X's cover of Y's song, and will like it so much that they find Y's original version, and perhaps discover Y. And, undoubtedly, Y will have done a cover of Z's song, and the process continues. (I should mention that I just recently found Sonata Arctica's (Finnish power/progressive/symphonic metal band) cover of "Wind Beneath My Wings." Ohhhhh man! It's so good. That's such a good song! Beaches was pretty good, too.)


6. If I find a band I like that I don't know too much about, I go to Wikipedia and see what bands influenced them, what other bands they're grouped together with, and what other bands were playing around the same time and in the same place. No matter how similar two bands are, their differences are much more interesting.


7. Shows like SNL, The Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show, etc. always have bands on. It's only a cross-section of what popular, but that's a start.


8. Friends always listen to at least one thing others don't. They're an invaluable source of new material!


9. I look for stuff I've never heard of. If I can't name a song by the band or artist, it means I need to know more about them. Also, if I can't name any artists from that country or time period, that means I need to go looking.

Those are just a few things I do.

[rsadelle]

So these all seem like good ideas, but here's why I don't do any of them: I don't care about music enough to put in the effort. When I was working, I was more likely to listen to artists like/tags on Last.fm (because it was easier to open up a tab when my officemate was out of the office than to carry around CDs), but I didn't pay enough attention to really pick up anything new from it - I tend to listen to music as background noise - although I did click the heart to love anything I liked. (Last.fm was cooler before CBS bought them out. They used to say, "Thanks for loving this track!" Now they say something like, "Added to your profile." Bah!)

Also, The O.C. was awesome. (I think it was really Death Cab that became big off of it. I recently rewatched the ep where they first talk about their music, and Summer says, "It's like one guitar and a whole lot of complaining.")