Book #3: Proust was a Neuroscientist

Title: Proust was a Neuroscientist
Author: Jonah Lehrer

Lehrer shows how Proust, Whitman, Cezanne, Woolf, George Eliot, Escoffier and Gertrude Stein all anticipated in their various works recent advances made in the field of neuroscience.

I bought this book for Eddie for Christmas, at his request, but since he was reading something else, I read it first. Just looking at the book, you probably wouldn't expect it to be much of a challenge. It's short, less than 200 pages without notes, and the exact shape of the hardcover versions of Mitch Albom's and Richard Paul Evans's books. But don't let yourself be fooled. I had to actually use my brain to understand this book about neuroscience. I remarked to Eddie, who is reading it now, that it's like a really long New Yorker article packaged as a gift book.

That said, it's worth reading. I particularly loved the chapters on Escoffier (food) and Woolf (realistic portrayals of mental illness in literature). Days after finishing the book, I still think about it every day. And that's saying a lot for my quickly decaying brain. In his chapter on Eliot, Lehrer talks about how neuroscientists have recently discovered that the brain can change and
sort of get smarter, by creating new pathways or something like that. Anyway, since I finished school, quit my job, and spend my days now watching and reading Dora the Explorer, I feel like my own brain has gotten a bit mushy (I also get a lot more questions wrong on Jeopardy than I used to). Maybe all hope isn't lost.