Within this technology-driven age, it’s tempting to trust that research can solve every mystery. In the end, research has healed countless diseases as well as sent humans into space. But simply because Jonah Lehrer argues in this dazzling debut, research is not the only way to knowledge. Actually, when it comes to understanding the mind, art got there first. Taking a band of artists – a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a small number of novelists – Lehrer displays how each one uncovered an essential truth about about Proust Was a Neuroscientist the mind that research is only right now rediscovering. We find out, for instance, how Proust first uncovered the fallibility of memory space; how George Eliot found out the brain’s malleability; the way the French chef Escoffier recognized umami (the fifth flavor); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of eyesight; and exactly how Gertrude Stein subjected the deep framework of vocabulary – a full half-century before the function of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. It is the greatest tale of art trumping research. Even more broadly, Lehrer shows that there’s a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Dimension is not exactly like understanding, and this is what artwork knows better than science. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate research composing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges research and art to listen more closely to one another, for willing thoughts can combine the best of both, to outstanding effect.