科学可以被看作是“认知”，艺术有关于“感知”，有趣的是，两者皆落

「Proust Was a Neuroscientist」读后感

【The Invisible Cities】by Calvino reminded me this book【Proust was a Neuroscientist】 so I took it down my shelf and read it again. The pages have turned yellow - it’s been a while, published in 2007. The author Jonah Lehrer used to work in the lab of Eric Kandel who won Nobel Prize for his seminal work on the neural foundation of memory. (Kandel has written some really good books I am itching to read as well), so the author had solid understanding of what science is. In 8 chapters, the books profiled 8 different artists, to illustrate how their art presaged the science which typically followed decades later. This science here is limited to biology, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, and not so much physics or chemistry, which is understandable given the author’s background, and also because these branches of science are the closest to the personal, individualistic human experience, the subject of art. The author tries to make the point that art and science are both indispensable avenues of pursuing knowledge, in an effort to counter the prevalent culture dominated by science and dismissive of art. Overall, I found the subject interesting, and some observations fascinating, but the linkage can be awkwardly tenuous from time to time. Not surprising, considering how ambitious the framework was set up to be. I’ve done quite some reading of at least the popular versions of neuroscience so the science part was no stranger to me, but I constantly wondered what science has discovered in the last ten plus years. I searched online, but didn’t find a new version or edition of this book.

Walt Whitman used his poem to state that our body and soul are the same. Our emotions and decisions are driven more by the body than the rational mind. I took something very different from this chapter than what the author has intended. We all have to treat our bodies well - your body is you.

George Eliot is one of my most respected novelists. In my mind, her 【middlemarch】should be as prominent in English literature as 【红楼梦】 in Chinese. She explored the concept of free will with her work and came to the observation that it is chance and our plasticity and malleability - i.e., our biology and our mind's ability to alter itself, and the incessant altering - that gives us the agency to be free willed, and with it comes moral accountability. “…our genome is defined not by the certainty of its meaning, but its linguistic instability, its ability to encourage a multiplicity of interpretations”. Isn't that fascinating? That’s true for literature and art, and it is also true for genomics.

Auguste Escoffier is credited with inventing the art of modern French cuisine. He discovered many of the principles of the taste and olfactory neural systems empirically. “…what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when sensations are interpreted by the subjective brain”.

Marcel Proust wrote his opus entirely focused on the mechanisms of memory, most notably its inescapable fleeting nature. “As long as we have memories to recall, the margins of those memories are being modified to fit what we know now”. “Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction”. By the way, this is one big area where Artificial Intelligence is far superior than human intelligence, as its memory is nearly unalterable.

Paul Cezanne’s paintings lie at the margin of what’s being sensed by our eyes and visual cortex and what’s been interpreted by our brain. I’ve always had a fascination with Cezanne’s work - it’s as avant garde as I am willing to go for visual art. I’ve found it to be more profound and satisfying than impressionism. Perhaps this is why. Kant wrote: “The imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself”. This point has been solidly discovered by modern science.

Igor Stravinsky’s music violated every single rule of the classic and romantic music era. “The work as a whole is guided only by its parts”. I’ve found listening to jazz is the same. Let the notes flow, go with the flow. If you can’t find the melody or structure, you will find beauty in the notes themselves and in their flow. The psychology of music is fascinating. “It is this psychological instinct - this desperate neuronal search for a pattern, any pattern - that is the source of music”. (The same can be said for all human cognitive functions). Music induces emotions because of its flirtation with, but not submission to, order. I’ve found some people are like this too. They enjoy the return of order - especially after long winded, hard fought periods of chaos. Some like it so much that they create chaos first.

Gertrude Stein’s poetry foreshadowed Noam Chomsky’s linguistics, the central tenet of which is that there is an overall structure to languages that’s universal. Indeed the universal language structure is now believed to be intrinsic to the structure of our brain and our cognitive functions. Language does not reflect reality. It reflects how our own brains are built. Stein tried to take meaning out of her writing, and when meaning is removed, the meaninglessness revealed another meaning: that we have only one language - the universal structure of language.

By far the most interesting was the last chapter on Virginia Woolf. I went and bought the complete works of Woolf after reading this chapter. Through her novels, Woolf revealed that the concept of “self” is an emergent property (a concept that’s information science in its essence and it is now commonly accepted even in hard science like physics. I recently spoke with a physics professor at Stanford who describes his research focus as “emergent property of matter”). “We take our scattered thoughts and inconstant sensations and we bind them into something solid”, or more precisely, something seemingly solid - the concept of self. Every I is actually plural. There are multiple personalities, myriad of experiences, multitude of possibilities that each of us could pivot to at any moment. The mind is always divided. Woolf discovered that the self emerges from the fragments of thoughts and disjointed experience through the act of attention. I’ve long suspected this is the case. Indeed, I’ve coined the phrase “Your attention is your life”. Neuroscience still has not fully solidified how attention works. Of course, this is also why meditation is so interesting. Meditation is the art of attention. Meditation is also the conscious effort at disentangling interpretation from that being interpreted. It is said that advanced meditators can sense better, because they interpret less.

Throughout the book, I was amazed by the fact these artists were seriously studying science of their time. Whitman studied brain anatomy textbooks and watched gruesome surgeries. George Eliot read Darwin and Maxwell - the former educated her on the importance of randomness and the latter determinism. Stein did science experiment in William James’s lab. (William James is one of the founding fathers of modern psychology). Woolf studied the biology of mental illness. Of course they all lived in the time of major scientific revolution and thus upheaval of our world view. Are today’s artists still studying science? Are today’s scientists studying art? How about in China? I can rarely find any indications, especially in China.

The only existence we know is the one that exists in our minds. We don’t just sense, we interpret. We don’t just observe, we organize. The philosopher Donald Davidson said “organizing system and something wanting to be organized” are hopelessly interdependent. Physicists captured the same in the “Uncertainty Principle”. Science is commonly misunderstood to be just about the “content, that which wanting to be organized”, and art about the personal experience of the "organizer”. “Organize" is a word that’s deeply information science in nature. What links that outside world we’ll never know and the only thing we will ever experience is information. In the Chinese language, 科学可以被看作是“认知”，艺术有关于“感知”，有趣的是，两者皆落在一个“知”字。知，无非是信息罢了。