Proust in Wired : The Frontal Cortex

ScienceBlogs Book Club: Inside the Outbreaks

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Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, and the New York Times and is a contributor to Radiolab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.

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Proust in Wired

Posted on: October 22, 2007 9:43 AM, by Jonah Lehrer

My book got a very nice little spread in the new Wired. There's a picture of me at an uncomfortable zoom and a short Q&A:

Q: Do you really think that we'll find answers to science's Big Questions in the arts?
A: Virginia Woolf isn't going to help you finish your lab experiment. What she will do is help you ask your questions better. Proust focused on problems that neuroscience itself didn't grapple with until relatively recently - questions of memory that couldn't be crammed into Pavlovian reinforcement: Why are memories so unreliable? Why do they change so often? Why do we remember only certain aspects of the past?

For context on the odd Kanye West allusion, look here. On a related note, Ted over at Bookeywookey has written a few generous and illuminating posts on Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Thanks so much Ted!

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Comments (4)

My pleasure. I so enjoyed your book.

Posted by: Ted | October 22, 2007 10:17 AM

I�m planning to submit to Oxford graduate studies a research statement for the philosophy department entitled : Neurohistory of philosophy "of" consciousness" which try to reveal how authors from the past have been anticipating, implicitely, or even explicitely, the very advances made by neuroscience concerning conciousness.
It is fantastic to know (via mindhacks.com) that what its call neurohistory (how scientific breakthroughs are anticipated by intellectuals before an objective measure finally will confirm them, the backward approach in neurohistory, because there is a forward approach that deals with drawing a new vocabulary for our conceptual framework while neuroscience discover new facts to udnerstand the mind/brain) its at the center or is the main point of your book.
I can�t wait to buy it!

Posted by: Anibal | October 26, 2007 11:15 AM

I was guessing the title of your next book would be "All fiction is gadget fiction."

Posted by: Gary Coulter | October 26, 2007 4:03 PM

...Am about halfway through the Proust chapter and just saw the picture of the page proof with all of the edits and paperoles; I can't help but wonder what Proust would have made of collaborative writing spaces so characteristic of Web2.0 today. I wonder what form a text like Search would have taken had it been written in a Wiki (or some other form of collaborative document creation)
I suspect that there is a lot of thinking to be done around how such collaborative spaces effect our personal (and our collective) memories.

Posted by: Christopher | November 13, 2007 1:13 PM