Prions, pleasure and purple notes

摘要

"Oh no he wasn't!" might well be the response to Jonah Lehrer's claim that Proust was a neuroscientist. And neither were Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein or Virginia Woolf. For Lehrer, an editor on the science and culture glossy Seed, neuroscience has confirmed their artistic intuitions: "Proust was right about memory, Cezanne was uncannily accurate about the visual cortex, Stein anticipated Noam Chomsky, and Woolf pierced the mystery of consciousness."