Jeff told me that I was a nerd yesterday. I guess I am. As much as I love the arts (and the idea that art will always carry with it mystery), I’ve become a technology/science addict. Jeff, though, was specifically referring to the fact that I was devouring the latest edition of WIRED Magazine as he was driving through rush hour traffic.

The cover story focused on Manga (Japanese cartoons), but that’s not the story that caught my eye. It was an interview with Rhodes Scholar Jonah Lehrer on Art for Science’s Sake. It bugs me a little that he spent so much time dissecting the works of some of our world’s greatest artists, but I was completely intrigued by his assertion that some of science’s most complex questions can be or have already been answered in the arts.

Excerpt from WIRED:

Jonah Lehrer wants scientists to bone up on the classics. A former neuroscience lab drone, the 26-year-old Rhodes scholar would devour pages of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way whenever he wasn’t spinning down DNA. In the process, he made a discovery: Artists have something to teach researchers. In his new book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Lehrer argues that many artists have foretold the scientific future — Proust revealed the inaccuracy of memory, chef Auguste Escoffier anticipated the fifth taste sensation we now call umami, and post-impressionist Paul Cézanne proved that the brain fills in what a painting doesn’t show.

I disagree with some of Lehrer’s ultimate conclusions (click here for the entire interview), like the idea that “there is no you in the brain, no neuron that is you or that cares about you. You’re just a massively distributed parallel network.” I believe that we’re unique, created and impossibly mysterious beings. However, I love Lehrer’s prompt that true science can never ignore the creative, right side of the brain.

Posted October 26th, 2007 by Leora in art |