2009 Dewey Decimal Project: 700.1 L
This month's book was Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. I'd read something about the book several months ago (I have a vague recollection that it was a blog post about an interview wherein someone asked Lehrer about Kanye West, possibly either at Marginal Revolution or Mind Hacks), and when I saw it on the new books shelf at the library, I picked it up.
I'm finding it interesting how many nonfiction books are more like a collection of essays than a coherent whole; this book fits into that mold.
The basic idea behind Proust Was a Neuroscientist is that artists have anticipated many things that neuroscience is only just now realizing. It's an interesting premise, and a lot of the things artists have known before neuroscience seem somewhat like common sense.
The book was certainly interesting, although I think it might have been more interesting if I'd read more (or, rather, any) of the works he references. I think my favorite chapter was "Auguste Escoffier: The Essence of Taste," about cooks and chefs discovering that umami is real before neuroscientists found the receptors for it on the tongue. It made me hungry, and revealed why my first attempt at black beans really needed tomatoes or salsa added to it. (Tomato sauce falls in his list of "potent sources of L-glutamate.")
In the chapter "Igor Stravinsky: The Source of Music," he tells us:Over time, the auditory cortex works the same way; we become better able to hear those sounds we have heard before. This only encourages us to listen to the golden oldies we already know (since they sound better), and to ignore the difficult songs that we don't know (since they sound harsh and noisy, and release unpleasant amounts of dopamine). We are built to abhor the uncertainty of newness.
How do we escape this neurological trap? By paying attention to art. The artist is engaged in a perpetual struggle against the positive-feedback loop of the brain, desperate to create an experience that no one has ever had before.
...
Without artists like Stravinsky who compulsively make everything new, our sense of sound would become increasingly narrow.
This makes me think I need to start listening to new music. I know I've noticed my own tendency to not bother with music I don't already know.
My favorite bits of the book are the entertaining commentaries and summaries of the works he covers. About George Eliot's Middlemarch: "Many depressing pages ensue." About Proust: "A sickly thirty-something, Proust had done nothing with his life so far except accumulate symptoms and send self-pitying letters to his mother." About Gertrude Stein: "If she is remembered today outside college campuses and histories of cubism, it is for a single clich
I'm finding it interesting how many nonfiction books are more like a collection of essays than a coherent whole; this book fits into that mold.
The basic idea behind Proust Was a Neuroscientist is that artists have anticipated many things that neuroscience is only just now realizing. It's an interesting premise, and a lot of the things artists have known before neuroscience seem somewhat like common sense.
The book was certainly interesting, although I think it might have been more interesting if I'd read more (or, rather, any) of the works he references. I think my favorite chapter was "Auguste Escoffier: The Essence of Taste," about cooks and chefs discovering that umami is real before neuroscientists found the receptors for it on the tongue. It made me hungry, and revealed why my first attempt at black beans really needed tomatoes or salsa added to it. (Tomato sauce falls in his list of "potent sources of L-glutamate.")
In the chapter "Igor Stravinsky: The Source of Music," he tells us:Over time, the auditory cortex works the same way; we become better able to hear those sounds we have heard before. This only encourages us to listen to the golden oldies we already know (since they sound better), and to ignore the difficult songs that we don't know (since they sound harsh and noisy, and release unpleasant amounts of dopamine). We are built to abhor the uncertainty of newness.
How do we escape this neurological trap? By paying attention to art. The artist is engaged in a perpetual struggle against the positive-feedback loop of the brain, desperate to create an experience that no one has ever had before.
...
Without artists like Stravinsky who compulsively make everything new, our sense of sound would become increasingly narrow.
This makes me think I need to start listening to new music. I know I've noticed my own tendency to not bother with music I don't already know.
My favorite bits of the book are the entertaining commentaries and summaries of the works he covers. About George Eliot's Middlemarch: "Many depressing pages ensue." About Proust: "A sickly thirty-something, Proust had done nothing with his life so far except accumulate symptoms and send self-pitying letters to his mother." About Gertrude Stein: "If she is remembered today outside college campuses and histories of cubism, it is for a single clich