Summary
Jonah Lehrer: Proust was a neuroscientist
Combining biography, essay, criticism and scientific writing, the author shows in eight portraits of artists (writers, cooks, painters and composers) how in their time, creating their masterpieces, they predicted many of today's scientific achievements. Thus, for example, Cézanne anticipated the modern understanding of sight, Whitman intuitively grasped the biological basis of thought, French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste), Gertrude Stein explored the deep structure of language (half a century before the works of Noam Chomsky and other linguists), and Proust learned the mysteries of memory by recalling his childhood.
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