In dit boek, gaat Jonah Lehrer na “how art and science might be reintegrated into an expansive critical sphere.” (197). Want
“[b]oth art and science can be useful, and both can be true. In our time, art is a necessary counterbalance to the glories and excesses of scientific reductionism, especially as they are applied to human experience. This is the artist’s purpose: to keep our reality, with all its frailties and question marks, on the agenda” (197).
Via acht case-studies (Whitman, Eliot, Escoffier, Proust, Cézanne, Stravinsky, Stein en Woolf) gaat hij na hoe fictie niet “the opposite of scientific fact” (ix) is, maar “[b]y exploring their own experiences, they expressed what no experiment could see” (xi): “what reality feels like” (x)
- Walt Whitman: “emotions are generated by the body” (2)
- George Eliot: “While scientists were searching for our biological constraints – they assumed we were prisoners of our hereditary inheritance – Eliot’s art argeud that the mind was “not cut in marble.” She believed that hte most essential element of human nature was its mallebility,t he way each of us can “will ourselves to change.” No matter how many mechanisms science uncovered, our freedom would remain” (26). / “Eliot wrote in a letter that her novles wre “simply a set of experiments in life – an endeavor to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of.” (25) :
- Auguste Escoffier
- Marcel Proust: “It reveals memory as a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. It shows us that every time we remember anythin, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, a process called reconsolidation. (Freud called this process Nachtraglichkeit, or “retroactivity”.) The memory is altered in the absence of the original stimulus, becoming less about what you remember and more about you. So the purely objective memory, the one “true” to the original taste of hte madeleine, is the one memory you will never know. The moment you remember the cookie’s taste is the same moment you forget what it really tasted like.” (85) / “As long as we have memories to recall, the margins of those memories are being modified to fit what we know now.” (87) / “In this Proustian paradigm, memories do not directly represent reality. Instead, they are imperfect copies of what actually happened, a Xerox of a Xerox of a mimeograph of the original photograh. Proust intuitively knew that our memories required this transformative process. If you prevent the memory from changing, it ceases to exist. Combray is lost. This is Proust’s guilty secret: we have to misremember something in order to remember it.” (89) / “These literary memories are precisely the sort of remembrances that the old scientific models couldn’t explain. Those models don’t seem to encapsulate the randomness and weirdness of the memory we live in. They don’t descibe its totality, the way memories appear and disappear, the way they change and float, sink and swell. Our memories obsess us precisely because they disobey every logic, because we never know what we will retain and what we will forget.” (90-91)
- Paul Cézanne: “His paintings were about the subjectivity of sight, the illusion of surfaces.” (97) / “Whenever we open our eyes, the brain engages in an act of astonishing imagination, as it transforms the residues of light into a world of form and space that we can understand. By probing inside the skull, scientists can see how our sensations are created, how the cells of the visual cortex silently construct sight. Reality is not out there waiting to be witnessed; reality is made by the mind.” (97) / “ambiguity is an essential part of the seeing process, as it leaves space for our subjective interpretations.” (107) / “Why does the mind see everything twice? Because our visual cortex needs help. After the prefrontal cortex receives its imprecise picture, the “top” of the brain quickly decides what the “bottom” has sees and begins doctoring the sensorary data. Form is imposed onto the formless rubble of the V1; the outside world is forced to conform to our expectations. If these interpretations are removed, our reality becomes unrecognizable. The light just isn’t enough.” (108)
- Igor Stravinsky
- Gertrude Stein
- Virginia Woolf: zie andere post
Uit: Lehrer, Jonah. Proust was a Neuroscientist. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston New York. 2007
Categorie: Jonah Lehrer, Literatuur, neurowetenschap, Verhalen, wetenschap
