inkbluesky

“Proust Was a Neuroscientist”

Did novelist George Eliot anticipate the ability of the brain to grow new cells? Did chef Auguste Escoffier foretell the science of the palate? Jonah Lehrer thinks so.

Lehrer’s ponderings about Escoffier are trivial. His writings about novelists including Proust, Virginia Woolf and George Eliot are disastrous. His treatment of Eliot serves an apt example, since he credits her with anticipating an especially surprising discovery about the brain: neurogenesis, or the ability to grow new neurons. Like the dogma of four flavors, the belief that the mature brain is cellularly complete was long taken for granted, only to be refuted by a scientist working at the margins of her discipline. In this case, the heroine was a postdoc named Elizabeth Gould, who observed rat brains healing themselves. Following years of diligent experimentation, Lehrer writes in his boilerplate Horatio Alger prose, “[t]he textbooks were rewritten: the brain is constantly giving birth to itself.” Which makes him think of Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” in which characters have the startling ability to develop, becoming, by the end of the book, different from who they were at the beginning. “[N]eurogenesis is evidence that we evolved to never stop evolving,” Lehrer writes. “Eliot was right: to be alive is to be ceaselessly beginning.”

As Jonathon Keats documents in his review is rather easy to look back and mistakenly conflate some artistic insights in humanity with some kind of weegie board vision into discoveries of natural science. It does a disservice to the artists and their heightened powers of observation and artistic gifts as much as it diminishes the discoveries of modern scientists and the frequently small, sometimes tedious incremental steps it took for scientists to make their breakthroughs. It reminds me of the people that read Nostradamus and where there are predictions filled with tons of ambiguities they see eerily accurate predictions.

village first snow

John F. Kennedy (D), Naval hero and the youngest president in our history was assassinated on November 22, 1963.