Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Tue 10 Mar 2009 10:34 PM PDT
PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST
review:
By D. T. MAX
Published: November 4, 2007
Jonah Lehrer strikes me as one of those young people who turn up
in articles on how life is now so competitive that children no longer
have time for jump-rope or adolescents for baby-sitting. At 25, he
has already been a Rhodes scholar, worked in the lab of a Nobel
Prize-winning neuroscientist and been a line chef in the kitchens
of Le Cirque 2000 and Le Bernardin. He writes a blog on science
issues affiliated with Seed magazine, where he is an editor, and now
has written “Proust Was a Neuroscientist,†a precocious and
engaging book that tries to mend the century-old tear between the
literary and scientific cultures.
In college, Lehrer did a double major in neuroscience and English. One day, during a break in molecular experiments on the nature of memory, which involved “performing the strange verbs of bench science: amplifying, vortexing, pipetting,†he picked up “Swann’s Way.†“All I expected from Proust was a little entertainment, or perhaps an education in the art of constructing sentences,†he writes. What he got instead was the surprise Virgil gave Dante: Proust had already discovered what Lehrer was trying to find out. He knew 1) that smell and taste produce uniquely intense memories, and 2) that memory is dependent on the moment and mood of the individual remembering. These were facts scientists didn’t establish until a few years ago. And here was Proust making the same point in 1913.
Quick as an ion opens a potassium gate, Lehrer began re-examining his favorite artists to see what they could teach us about the mind. He found that writers and musicians consistently lead the way to new theories with inspiration, while scientists mop up with hard data. Gertrude Stein’s experimental writing presaged Noam Chomsky’s work on grammar, while Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring†anticipated discoveries by neurologists that what the mind at first rejects as ugly it later perceives as beautiful, once the underlying patterns have been recognized.
Here’s Lehrer’s take on how the process works in the case of Proust and memory. Proust’s goal in “Remembrance of Things Past†is to anatomize memory. His literary examinations teach him that smell and taste are the most intense of remembered sensations. “When from a long distant past nothing subsists,†he writes, “after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone ... bear unflinchingly ... the vast structure of recollection.†Fast forward some 90 years to 2002, when Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown, shows that smell and taste are indeed uniquely potent evokers of memory. This power, she speculates, lies in the direct connection the gustatory and olfactory nerves have to the hippocampus, which Lehrer calls “the center of the brain’s long-term memory.â€
Similarly, Proust beat neuroscientists to the punch in discovering that memory is faulty and always changing. To remember is to misremember. For instance, in his narrator’s recollection, the location of Albertine’s beauty mark moves from “her chin to her lip to a bit of cheekbone just below her eye,†as Lehrer notes. Recently, researchers at New York University proved that Proust got the mutability of memory right. First they conditioned rats to fear a loud noise by associating it with an electric shock. Then they gave them a chemical injection to stop their memory of the shock just as they were about to hear the noise. With their access to the memory temporarily blocked, the rats went on to lose the memory itself entirely. Their brains had reset. “A memory,†Lehrer writes, “is only as real as the last time you remembered it.â€
Lehrer is smart, and there are some fun moments in these pages. But while he is good at showing that Artist A’s work preceded Biologist B’s, he only rarely shows that A influenced B. So what he’s written is not quite intellectual history, more like intellectual patterning. At the same time, I’m not sure all his conclusions follow from his data. What the N.Y.U. memory researcher showed, it seems to me, is only that memories fade when they are not used, which we hardly need Proust to confirm. And Herz herself did not think she had proven the accuracy of Proust’s proposition: she found that smells produce emotionally intense memories but not particularly intricate ones. Proust’s “confidence in the precise contents of his odor-cued recollections may have been ill founded,†she concludes in her 2002 paper.
In 1959, C. P. Snow asserted that there were now two cultures in the educated world, the scientific and the artistic, separated by “mutual incomprehension.†Artists did not understand — or care about — science; physicists and biologists paid no attention to art. Today, scientists are making border raids. There is a literary-scientific movement called biopoetics, led by the Harvard professor E. O. Wilson, that wants the humanities, as he wrote in his 1999 book “Consilience,†“rationalized.†Biopoetics wants to know why literature is necessary. What is its evolutionary function? And what does it mean to say one book is “better†than another? They’d like to wire a reader with “Madame Bovary†on a gurney to see what parts of his brain light up when Emma Bovary has sex with Rodolphe and which when she commits suicide. Now here comes Lehrer, pushing back. You don’t need Newton’s Third Law of Motion to tell you that turnabout is fair play.
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