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Jump to navigationJump to searchProust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer (view source)
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In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare wrote,''Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, wherin he puts alms for oblivion''. This fully accords with the discoveries of modern brain science. Proust in his famous novel, ''In Search of Lost Time'' anticipates such discoveries by neuroscientists, such as Rachel Hertz, that smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the hippocampus. Thus the taste of a petit madeleine evokes a rediscovery by Proust of Combray and a flow of associations - it is the part of the brain in which long term memory is centred. Lehrer in ''Proust was a Neuroscientist'' weaves an intriguing argument about the relationship between recent neuroscientific discoveries and the novels of George Eliot, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. A scientist, who has researched with Nobel Prize-winning, [[:Category:Eric R Kandel|Eric Kandel]], has a taste for philosophy; Lehrer intends to heal the rift between what C.P.Snow termed the ''Two Cultures''. He wishes to accord respect to the truths and the intuitive discoveries, especially of modernist writers and painters.
'Proust was a Neuroscientist' illustrates how researchers have, for instance, located those receptors that are responsible for discerning new tastes and smells. In an interesting and amusing chapter, Lehrer explains how the latter discerning receptors take up a huge amount of DNA-about 3 per cent of the human genome. The nose contains at least 350 receptor types. Millisecond pulses detected in fruit flies have been doctored with fluorescent proteins which flash when an odour impinges. Scientists have studied the resulting flashes under high powered microscopes and mapped the resulting patterns as neon flashes in the fly brain. This is part of the melange contained in a light-hearted chapter about the French gastronomic chef, Auguste Escoffier, who created culinary symphonies by means of glutamate laden veal stock sauces that so delighted the Parisian haute bourgeoisie in the Hotel César Ritz.
