INTERVIEW WITH JONAH LEHRER

Dancer and multi-media artist Heather McCalden interviews Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

 

 

Heather McCalden: Would you mind relaying a bit about your experiences in the lab, the kitchen, and the writer's desk - how they may have fed each other, for instance?  Have the commonalities (assuming they exist) provoked any of the ideas in Proust was a Neuroscientist?  

 

Jonah Lerher: A few years before I started working in a lab, back when I was working as a weekend prep cook in a restaurant for gas money, I had this epiphany about chefs: they actually know what they're talking about. When you first start working in a kitchen, there are all these idiosyncratic rules that make no sense. You've got to chop the onion like this for this dish and like that for that dish. It all seemed so arbitrary. But then, over time, I realized that the culinary rules had a real logic to them. Even though the chefs couldn't explain why you needed to cut an onion this particular way – it probably has something to do with the breakdown of sulfuric acid and the carmelization of sugars – they had found the best possible technique. In other words, they were intuitive chemists. Even as a lowly prep cook, I was impressed by the way a body of culture could build up this implicit knowledge purely through experience and practice.  So I guess I was prepared in advance for my insight about Proust being a neuroscientist, which I had while reading Proust in a lab. (I had developed the bad habit of reading novels while waiting for my experiments to finish. Before Proust, I had been on a six months-long Bellow jag.)

 

HM: Throughout the text you talk about the brain "interpreting" sensory information and then translating these interpretations into consciousness so they may become experience.  The way you describe this progression makes it seem analogous to the process by which one creates a narrative:  raw experiences are amassed, fine-tuned, and ordered - by use of themes in some cases - to form a (coherent) story. Do you think this is an appropriate analogy, and if so, could this be the reason why the book took on a literary slant?  Why writers seem to have a clearer grasp of the mind than dancers, musicians, or artists of other disciplines?

 

JL: There definitely is a strong narrative aspect to the sensory process.  One of my favorite psychological metaphors comes from William James, who described a sensation  "as rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever account of his affairs the lawyer finds it most expedient to give." The reality is that reality is overwhelming, and so the brain is constantly taking lazy shortcuts, trying to find the most efficient way to represent  what's out there. If writers do have a clearer grasp of this process than other artists – and I'm not entirely sure that's true, or so I argue in my Cezanne chapter -  I think it's because language is the stuff of thought, and writers are uniquely equipped to describe the details of the mind in terms we readily understand. Even if a dancer or composer has an insight about how the brain works, the specifics of that insight are going to be more difficult to express given their set of expressive tools.

 

HM: What artists or artworks currently in the world do you find yourself admiring?  Are there any specific pieces or people who show signs of foretelling future scientific insights?

 

JL: So much stuff. I loved Olafur Eliasson's recent show at MoMA. I think his art does a marvelous job of making us confront our epistemological frailities, or the way our senses are master bullshit artists. And no one merges art and science better than Richard Powers: I loved The Echo Maker.  That said, I don't think it's necessary to write on a scientific theme in order to contribute to (future) science. The reason we are still reading Homer and Shakespeare and Joyce is that the art feels true. The work endures because it seems to capture something essential about human nature. The question for science is what that is. Why is Hamlet such a potent character? Why do we stare at Jackson Pollack paintings? Etc. Artists are constantly being forced to reverse-engineer the brain. By reverse-engineering the art - by trying to understand why, exactly, it resonates with us - we can learn about the mind.

 

HM: How do you see the figures of the artist and the scientist?  Could they be identical since they share the fundamental characteristic of an inquisitive mind coupled with desire?

 

JL: That was definitely one of the surprising lessons I learned while researching the book. I went in with this naive assumption that artists and scientists had opposite methods, but then, as I got deeper into the subject, I began to see the striking commonalities. For starters, both art and science are really hard. A good experiment and a good novel require the individual to parse the world in a new way, and that certainly isn't easy. And then there was the stubborn fact that so many of the artists I talk about in the book saw themselves as truthtellers, much like modern scientists.  George Eliot famously described her novels as a "a set of experiments in life." Virginia Woolf, before she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, said that in her new novel the "psychology should be done very realistically." Whitman worked in Civil War hospitals and wanted his poetry to refine the latest scientific theories, such as phrenology. (In his notebook, Whitman reminded himself to always question the veracity of the experiment: "Remember in scientific and similar allusions that the theories of Geology, History, Language, &c., &c., are continually changing. Be careful to put in only what must be appropriate centuries hence.") Gertrude Stein joked that her difficult writing style was inspired by some automatic writing experiments she had conducted years earlier at Harvard. The point is that these artists didn't think they were writing pretty fairytales: they knew they were making something that would last, and it would last because it was saying something true.

 

HM: Do you think the prevailing attitudes towards the cultures of science and art affect how they're taught?  Having studied both forms in the academic realm, did you encounter presumptions and biases inside the classroom?  Meaning, are scientists taught to overlook elements of their human nature, and are artists  encouraged to shut off their sense of logic?

 

JL: In my experience, the bias was more like this: scientists-in-training are taught that the best facts are the most precise facts, and that any truths drawn from experience are bound to flimsy and false. Literature professors-in-training (is that what we're training for when we decide to become English majors?) are taught that it's hopelessly old-fashioned to think about art in terms of real truth, or to toss around words like "Human Nature." It's all about the shape of sentences, or the cultural/historical forces that created the work. So you can begin to see why it's so hard for the academy to reconcile our two cultures. How do you find a connection between some remote acronym and the prose of Virginia Woolf?

 

HM: Did the ideas in Proust feel risky to you, or was it more like simply sharing the results of an investigation (slightly less life-threatening, but still, potentially, exhilarating)?

JL: I think the risk was that they didn't seem risky. Let me explain: I think it's natural for writers, when they're working through an idea, to get seduced by their own connections. I would always get worried when I couldn't imagine Proust not being a neuroscientist, when I started to only read his epic text through this one narrow interpretative prism. I'd have to constantly remind myself that Proust wrote about many things beside memory, and that I had merely come up with yet another way of understanding his search for lost time.

 

HM: What's next for you?

 

JL: I'm working on a book about the neuroscience of decision-making, or what happens in the brain when we make up our mind. (It should be out, god-willing, next February.) The motive for the book was obvious: I'm pathologically indecisive, and often spend ten minutes or so in the cereal aisle of the supermarket, trying to decide between various flavors of Cheerios.

 

HM: Could you disclose the name of your parakeet? 

 

JL: I have a cockatiel named Leo and an African Grey Parrot named June. Both are my constant writing companions.