Volgens Jonah Lehrer stelt Virginia Woolf zich in haar boeken de volgende vraag over het menselijke bewustzijn en zijn identiteit:
“But if the mind is so evanescent, then how does the self arise? Why do we feel like more thatn just a collection of disconnected thoughts? Woolf’s revelation was that we emerge form our own fleeting interpretations of the world.” (169)
“The self is simply this subject: it is the story we tell ourselves about our experiences.” (169)
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)
