Proust was a neuroscientistProust was a neuroscientist
All In The Mind
Of course Proust wasn't a neuroscientist. Or was he? Science writer Jonah Lehrer argues 19th century artists from Paul Cezanne to Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein to Walt Whitman anticipated some of the great discoveries about the mind and brain in their ground-breaking art and prose -- realisations that science is only rediscovering now. He's calling for a radical rethink of truth, art and science. Art can make science better, he reckons.
36:10•9 Feb 2008
Proust, Memory and the Mind: When Artists Outrun Neuroscience
Episode Overview
- Art can express real truths about the mind that science later confirms.
- Smell and taste link directly to long-term memory, which explains their strong nostalgia.
- The body and soul are deeply entangled, a view echoed by modern emotion research.
- Our visual system builds scenes from lines and contrasts, much like Cezanne’s late paintings.
- Artists can help scientists ask better questions by showing what current methods leave out.
“The real mystery of consciousness is how the water of the brain becomes the wine of the mind.”
What insights can experts and survivors share about addiction? While this episode of *All In The Mind* isn’t about addiction directly, it tackles something anyone in recovery will recognise: the messy, mysterious nature of memory, emotion and the self. Science writer Jonah Lehrer joins host Natasha Mitchell to chat about his book *Proust Was a Neuroscientist*.
At just 25, Jonah argues that 19th and early 20th century artists such as Marcel Proust, Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Cezanne and Virginia Woolf had eerily accurate ideas about how the brain works long before modern neuroscience caught up. As he puts it, "these two very different descriptions of the brain...
are both trying to express the same underlying phenomenon, which is the human mind and human nature." You’ll hear the famous madeleine scene from Proust used to explain why smell and taste feel so nostalgic, linked directly to the hippocampus and long-term memory. Whitman’s bold poetry about the body and soul is tied to phantom limb research and modern work on emotion in the body.
Cezanne’s sparse landscapes get connected to how the visual cortex builds images from lines and edges, and Gertrude Stein’s strange sentences become a playful way to think about Chomsky’s universal grammar. Jonah pushes for a "fourth culture" where art and science genuinely talk to each other, rather than science simply handing down facts.
He suggests that artists can help scientists ask better questions, especially about consciousness and the self: "how the water of the brain becomes the wine of the mind." If you’re curious about how story, sensation and science all shape your sense of who you are, this conversation might leave you wondering what truths about your own mind are still waiting to be written – how might art and science together help you make sense of change, healing and growth?
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