BOOKS & ARTS |Vol 450|1 November 2007

This observation motivated neuroscientist ing structure is crucial in coming to under- electrical cells and synaptic spaces”, and of for- Rodolfo Llinás, in his 2002 book I of the Vortex, stand function — as in William Harvey’s getting that “this isn’t how we experience the to propose that, at bottom, thinking is the evolu- seventeenth-century revelation that hearts are world”. Some scientists maybe, but it hardly tionary internalization of movement. He meant actually pumps, not biological cauldrons for describes psychologists. The coda begins that thinking is the generation in the brain of concocting animal spirits. To figure out how with the “incommensurate languages” of images of a future action, and its consequences. brains actually think and what reasoning really C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, and then attacks And generating these images depends on flex- amounts to, we need to focus on understand- , , ibility in categorizing the current problem as ing their many levels of organization, from and E. O. Wilson and the “third culture” for an instance of one kind of event rather than neurons to large-scale systems to behaviour. If being antagonistic towards everything non- another, which, in turn, depends on memory thinking is rooted in internalized movement, it scientific and lacking a dialogue of equals. for past experience. Fundamentally, thinking is may be more akin to a skill than to a syllogism. By contrast, Ian McEwan’s Saturday is neural activity in the service of behaviour (for Language may not be the “stuff of thought” invoked as a rare cultural commodity that example, should I flee or fight? Is this attacker after all. ■ possibly symbolizes the birth of a new fourth weak or strong?). This almost certainly shapes Patricia S. Churchland is professor of philosophy culture, in which the humanities engage sin- thinking that seems detached from motor prep- at the University of California San Diego, La Jolla, cerely with the . Lehrer argues that aration (such as, where did Earth come from?). California 92093, USA. She is the author of Brain- every humanist should read Nature and that As is so often the case in biology, discover- Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy. scientists should recognize truths other than their own, with art “a necessary counterbal- ance to the glories and excesses of scientific reductionism, especially as they are applied to human experience”. It’s a grand dream but, Prions, pleasure and purple notes for me, Lehrer’s own attempt at a fourth cul- ture fails. As Gerard Manley Hopkins might Proust was a Neuroscientist exactly that, if the term ‘neuroscientist’ is to say, whatever “the achieve of, the mastery of” by Jonah Lehrer retain any serious meaning. the artists, the as laid out here seems Houghton Mifflin: 2007. 256 pp. $24 The Proust chapter in Lehrer’s elegant book “sheer plod”, undermining the central con- includes some brief biographical background, ceit — for what artist would partake in such a The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art a little on Henri Bergson’s influence, and paltry matter? and Science then the famous passage with the madeleine: Lehrer’s last lines posit that the individuality by Cretien van Campen “What did Proust learn from these prophetic of our experiences is what science will never be MIT Press: 2007. 208 pp. $29.95 crumbs of sugar, flour, and butter? He actu- able to serve, because “each of us literally inhab- ally intuited a lot about the structure of our its a different brain, tuned to the tenor of our Chris McManus brain.” These intuitions included “smell and private desires”. I was therefore surprised to find “Oh no he wasn’t!” might well be the response taste are the only senses that connect directly no mention of synaesthesia, whose recent sci- to Jonah Lehrer’s claim that Proust was a to the hippocampus, the center of the brain’s entific renaissance confronts the idiosyncratic neuroscientist. And neither were Walt Whit- long-term memory, [whereas] all other senses perceptions described by artists such as Wassily man, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Paul are first processed by the thalamus, the source Kandinsky, Alexander Scriabin and Vladimir Cézanne, , Gertrude Stein or of language and the front door to conscious- Nabokov, and which potentially provides a fer- Virginia Woolf. For Lehrer, an editor on the ness”. If indeed Proust intuited this anatomy, tile middle ground between art and science. science and culture glossy Seed, neuroscience it was unfortunate because the taste pathway In The Hidden Sense, Cretien van Campen, a has confirmed their artistic intuitions: “Proust is wrong, and few regard the thalamus as the self-styled naturalist of synaesthesia, explores was right about memory, Cézanne was uncan- source of language — particularly Proust’s this ground, providing a gentle, insightful, nily accurate about the visual cortex, Stein compatriot, Paul Broca. often personal, account of coloured words, anticipated Noam Chomsky, and Woolf Neuroscientists are then painted as naïve smells, tones, pains, even orgasms, that will pierced the mystery of consciousness.” and uncultured, assuming that memories are fascinate scientists, artists, synaesthetes and Lehrer’s conceit of the artist as a neuroscientist “just shelved away in the brain, like dusty old others. Slowly, this deep, seemingly intractable, is not unique. Neurobiologist Semir Zeki feels books in a library” and that the secret of mem- subjectivity yields to some phenomenology, Shakespeare and Wagner are “among the great- ory lies in “senseless repetition”. After a ramble simple questionnaires, elegant experiments, a est of neurologists”, probing the mind of man through Cajal and Freud, and a rat experiment dash of neuroimaging, and much thought and using language and music. Likewise, cognitive on remembrance and reconsolidation, comes a reflection. psychologist Patrick Cavanagh has written of deep dive into neurobiologist Kausik Si’s ideas Synaesthesia is not, says van Campen, “an painters whose use of shadows, colours, reflec- on the prion-like cytoplasmic protein CPEB. audiovisual performance, a trend in art or tions and contours shows how the “visual brain This protein, Si believes, may participate in the music, a drug-induced hallucination, a kind uses a simpler, reduced physics”, and hence that formation of long-term memory, and in some of metaphor”. Nor is it, he concludes, a rare, “artists act as research neuroscientists”. way explains how Combray, the fictional vil- demarcated, distinctive anomaly like colour- Call me old-fashioned, but neuroscience lage of Proust’s childhood, could exist “silently blindness. Synaesthesia is instead the end of a surely needs at least some indirect involvement below the surface, just behind the curtain of continuum, manifesting as intermediate forms with the greyish–pink stuff inside heads? How- consciousness”. Lehrer triumphantly concludes in most people. He classes synaesthesia within ever valid in their own way, painting, cooking, that “prions are, by definition, unpredictable Kant’s sensus communis aestheticus, emphasiz- and writing novels, poems and music simply and unstable, because memory obeys nothing ing the pleasure, joy and “hypnotising beauty” aren’t neuroscience. Even cognitive science but itself. This is what Proust knew: the past is of the phenomena experienced. ■ would be pushing it. Where are the method- never past”. Chris McManus is professor of and ology, the experimentation, the data and the The most interesting parts of Proust was a medical education in the Division of Psychology hypothesis testing? “The impression is for the Neuroscientist are its manifestos on art and sci- and Language Sciences at University College writer what experimentation is for the scien- ence in the prelude and coda. Lehrer accuses London, London WC1E 6BT, UK. His book Right tist,” said Proust. But impressions are neither scientists of seeing the brain solely in terms of Hand, Left Hand won the 2002 Aventis Prize for experiments nor science. The conceit remains its physical details, as “nothing but a loom of Science Books.

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