A neuroscientist debunked...

Sometime ago I read Proust was aneuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. The review below is what I wrote for the local paper at the time. I've just come across this book again in an article in the latest NZ Listener, which is discussing a much more recent book on neuroscience by Christian Jarrett, called Great Myths of the Brain, which I hope to read at some point soon. 

Apparently, Lehrer has had a major fall from grace. "...in 2012...Lehrer was accused of recycling his own work and plagiarising the work of others. Two books were recalled, the New Yorker sacked him and he has largely disappeared from view...much of Lehrer's plagiarism was from Jarrett's British Psychological Society digest."

Here's what I wrote about that first book, back in 2011.

Lehrer’s idea for this book is to compare the thinking of various artists (Walt Whitman, Virginia Wolff, Gertrude Stein and Paul Cezanne to name just a few) with the discoveries science has been making about the brain. In relation to each artist he focuses on a particular aspect of the way (we think) the brain works and shows that often an artist has already ‘gone ahead’ and intuitively understood these things. 

It’s an intriguing idea and one that comes off well in some chapters and not so well in others. As a musician I found the chapter on Stravinsky less than satisfactory. He insists on calling The Rite of Spring a symphony and writes as though all (actual) symphonies before this composition appeared were classical in structure. And while Stravinsky was certainly an iconoclast, he was by no means the only person changing the shape of music around that time. Nor did he suddenly begin his musical career with a work that was completely off-the-wall. 

That quibble aside, the book is full of fascinating stuff, both scientifically and artistically. As always, we meet scientists who would rather cling to a theory than allow someone else to prove them wrong, and inevitably their goal becomes the quashing of the younger scientist’s findings. We read about all manner of discoveries in relation to the brain, in areas as varied as the memory, how we perceive feeling, taste, sight, language and what the self is...or isn’t. Many of these discussions are fascinating, and, for the most part, quite accessible.

Lehrer’s book is one of a number on neuroscience that have come out in the last short while. V S Ramachandran , Iain McGilchrist and Nicholas Hum­phrey have all written on the subject. Consequently, while Lehrer often convinces in his discussion of the brain and the mind, it needs to be remembered that what he’s saying is by no means the last word on the topic.  Our current state of neuroscientific thinking is in an extraordinary state of forward movement on one hand and dismay at how little we know on the other.  

Late blooming and looking blooming good!

Jurgen Wolff alerted me to an interesting article in the New Yorker, by Malcolm Gladwell, (the author of The Tipping Point).
It's about late bloomers, people who have creative talent, but for various reasons such as lack of experience, lack of facility with the artistic material they use, lack of means or whatever, take a long time to flower. Cezanne is one example, but Gladwell focuses a lot more on, a writer who took more than a decade of full-time writing to really get off the ground. And even then it was only because he had a wife who gave him the opportunity to work at his craft while she brought home the bacon.
There are also some interesting stats the defy the idea that genius is also found in the young. Some people, like Picasso, just get up and go. Many famous authors, artists, creative people, took a lot longer to reveal the talent they had; they were people who had to kind of search for what they needed to say/paint/whatever. Young geniuses tend to just go for it, and the material opens up before them. Picasso and Mozart are prime examples.
All of this is interesting in the light of the post I wrote on Elliot Carter the other day: he's increasingly blooming, producing works in his 7th, 8th, 9th decades with a facility born of long hard work.