In this technology-driven age, it's tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, when it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first.
Taking a group of artists � a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists � Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain's malleability; how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language � a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. It's the ultimate tale of art trumping science.

More broadly, Lehrer shows that there's a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and art knows this better than science does. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate science writing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science and art to listen more closely to each other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect.

"This is a delightful little book . . . fun to read and thought provoking." --Joseph LeDoux, New York University, author of The Emotional Brain and Synaptic Self

Prelude ix
1. Walt Whitman The Substance of Feeling 1
2. George Eliot The Biology of Freedom 25
3. Auguste Escoffier The Essence of Taste 53
4. Marcel Proust The Method of Memory 75
5. Paul Cezanne The Process of Sight 96
6. Igor Stravinsky The Source of Music 120
7. Gertrude Stein The Structure of Language 144
8. Virginia Woolf The Emergent Self 168
Coda 190
Acknowledgments 199
Notes 201
Bibliography 216
Index 231