I have chosen them because their art proved to be the most accurate, because they most explicitly anticipated our science. Nevertheless, the originality of these artists was influenced by a diverse range of other thinkers. I have attempted to sketch the intellectual atmosphere that shaped their creative process, to highlight the people and ideas from which their art emerged.
One of the most important influences on all of these artists —and the only influence they all shared—was the science of their time. Long before C. It is impossible to understand their art without taking into account its relationship to science.
This was a thrilling time to be studying science. By the start of the twentieth century, the old dream of the Enlightenment seemed within reach.
Everywhere scientists looked, mystery seemed to retreat. Life was just chemistry, and chemistry was just physics. The entire universe was nothing but a mass of vibrating molecules.
For the most part, this new knowledge represented the triumph of a method; scientists had discovered reductionism and were successfully applying it to reality.
This is all we are: parts, acronyms, atoms. That would have been too easy. By exploring their own experiences, they expressed what no experiment could see. Since then, new scientific theories have come and gone, but this art endures, as wise and resonant as ever. In each of the following chapters, I have tried to give a sense of the scientific process, of how scientists actually distill their data into rigorous new hypotheses.
Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination. Unfortunately, our current culture subscribes to a very narrow definition of truth. Because this strict scientific approach has explained so much, we assume that it can explain everything. But every method, even the experimental method, has limits. Take the human mind. Scientists describe our brain in terms of its physical details; they say we are nothing but a loom of electrical cells and synaptic spaces.
We feel like the ghost, not like the machine. It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness. The moral of this book is that we are made of art and science. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff. We now know enough about the brain to realize that its mystery will always remain.
Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery. Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural. I hope these stories of artistic discovery demonstrate that any description of the brain requires both cultures, art and science.
The reductionist methods of science must be allied with an artistic investigation of our experience. In the following chapters, I try to re-imagine this dialogue.
Science is seen through the optic of art, and art is interpreted in the light of science. The experiment and the poem complete each other. The mind is made whole. We do not have a body, we are a body. See, your own shape and countenance. At the time, scientists believed that our feelings came from the brain and that the body was 1 proust was a neuroscientist just a lump of inert matter.
Instead of dividing the world into dualisms, as philosophers had done for centuries, Whitman saw everything as continuous with everything else. For him, the body and the soul, the profane and the profound, were only different names for the same thing.
Every line he ever wrote ached with the urges of his anatomy, with its wise desires and inarticulate sympathies. Ashamed of nothing, Whitman left nothing out. Ephemeral as they seem, our feelings are actually rooted in the movements of our muscles and the palpitations of our insides.
Furthermore, these material feelings are an essential element of the thinking process. Whitman enjoyed the controversy. Nothing pleased him more than dismantling prissy Victorian mores and inverting the known facts of science. The soul was the source of reason, science, and everything nice. Our cranial packaging revealed our insides; the rest of the body was irrelevant. Innumerable medical treatises, dense with technical illustrations, were written to defend its theories.
Twenty-seven different mental talents were uncovered. But measurement is always imperfect, and explanations are easy to invent. This was his data. It is hard to imagine its allure or comprehend how it endured for most of the nineteenth century. Fowler, are preposterous to the last degree.
Be careful to put in only what must be appropriate centuries hence. Like Descartes, phrenologists looked for the soul solely in the head, desperate to reduce the mind to its cranial causes.
Whitman realized that such reductions were based on a stark error. By ignoring the subtleties of his body, these scientists could not possibly account for the subtleties of his soul. When Whitman was still a struggling journalist living in Brooklyn, Emerson was beginning to write his lectures on nature. A lapsed Unitarian preacher, Emerson was more interested in the mystery of his own mind than in the preachings of some aloof God.
George Eliot shaved her head so that her phrenologist could make a more accurate diagnosis of her cranial bumps. And while Whitman and Emerson shared a philosophy, they could not have been more different in person. Emerson looked like a Puritan minister, with abrupt cheekbones and a long, bony nose. When he wanted to think, he would take long walks by himself in the woods.
He was fascinated by people, these citizens of his sensual democracy. Emerson was beginning his lecture tour, trying to promote his newly published Essays. For the next decade, he continued to simmer, seeing New York as a journalist and as the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle and Freeman. He wrote articles about criminals and abolitionists, opera stars and the new Fulton ferry.
He scored nearly perfect on virtually every possible phrenological trait. Oddly enough, two of his lowest scores were for the traits of tune and language. With no audience but himself, Whitman was free to experiment. While every other poet was still counting syllables, Whitman was writing lines that were messy montages of present participles, body parts, and erotic metaphors.
Even his bad poetry is bad in a completely original way, for Whitman only ever imitated himself. Emerson responded with a letter that some said Whitman carried around Brooklyn in his pocket for the rest of the summer. At the time, Whitman was an anonymous poet and Emerson a famous philosopher. His letter to Whitman is one of the most generous pieces of praise in the history of American literature. I am very happy in reading it. I greet you at the beginning of a great career.
But by , Emerson had probably come to regret his literary endorsement. O Hymenee! Apparently, some parts of Nature still had to be censored.
Had no one understood his earlier poetry? Had no one seen its philosophy? The body is the soul. Email required Address never made public. I do not agree with Lehrer on everything, but I value this book for that very reason.
You are commenting using your Facebook account. Lehrer describes a few artists and their works to show that a lot of times artists discover truths about human nature while scientists of their time still have it wrong. He seems, with his first book, to have burst, gun in hand, through a door that is already open. One of my most admired scientists is Dr.
Published June 1st by Mariner Books first published He pits them against each other. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: The premise of this book is great, but the author fails to make good enough connections half the time.
In most cases these were just the most beautifully expressed versions of the known unknowns in which many others had long believed to be true.
For a long period of time she studied automatic writing and came to the conclusion that the structure of language is built in our brains. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. This book completely changed the way I thought about literary heavy hitters and artists of all kinds. How Creativity Worksand his work was subject to charges of plagiarism and fabrication. A very interesting, well written well researched book about the parallels between art and neuroscience as shown in the works of artists such as Whitman, Proust, Stravinsky, Cezanne.
Lehrer argues for C. Elsewhere he summarises the problem in words so right, they sing: George Eliot, an avid reader of science, explored human nature and the malleability of the mind. Therefore, he composed The Rite of Spring to be utterly shocking to the tastes of the contemporary public.
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Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to non fiction, science lovers.
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