Do artists know best?

Jonah Lehrer has worked in the lab of a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist studying memory, done stints in the kitchen of top-notch New York restaurants and now works as a magazine editor and blogger. At the age of 25 (!) he has written a dazzling yet always accessible book blending literary criticism and neuroscience.

In "Proust Was a Neuroscientist" -- essays on Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf -- he argues persuasively that artists have anticipated what neuroscientists have only recently learned about how the brain processes and orders that blooming confusion we call reality.

Art is not the antithesis of science, he argues. Rather, it is a complementary mode of revealing what we are made of and what the incoming world feels like to an individual. Art particularizes what science uncovers about the laws of human nature. "We now know that Proust was right about memory, Cezanne was uncannily accurate about the visual cortex, Stein anticipated Chomsky, and Woolf pierced the mystery of consciousness," Lehrer writes. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff."

Proust discovered that taste and smell are the strongest and most direct triggers of memory because, unlike sight and hearing, they bypass consciousness to connect directly to the center of the brain's long-term memory. He also showed that memory is unstable; it changes over time because it is linked to how we feel in the present moment. Lehrer summarizes: "Our recollections are cynical things, designed by the brain to always feel true, regardless of whether or not they actually occurred."

Similarly, Cezanne had an epiphany about sight, realizing that impressions aren't a copy of the outside world but interpretation, unique to each observer; seeing is an act of creation. What he and the other artists Lehrer has chosen demonstrate is that the senses are not separate from mind. They originate from the body but as crude signals that can only be felt as self-consciousness, the experience of being a self. And that ghostly subject will, he believes, never be found by science because it has no geographical location; it is the constant process and interaction of neurons that function like a language, with a universal grammar capable of generating an infinite variety of content: a self experienced as a unique "I."

And speaking of language, Noam Chomsky iterated as theory what Gertrude Stein found out in practice. She tried to play with the mind by writing nonsense pieces. She came to realize that no matter what random, incompatible verbs and nouns she used, she couldn't escape the tyranny of grammar: subject, verb, object, along with the auxiliary adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions etc. There is a pattern, an electrical synapse that predisposes us to language. Chomsky paid her homage, probably without knowing her work, when he demolished the dominant language-learning theory at the time, which posited a laborious notion of children imitating parents and learning not simply words but the grammar that organizes them. In a Steinian moment, he came up with "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." The content may be nonsense, but the grammar makes sense. The human brain has a template for it.

Another thrilling discovery by neuroscientists was prefigured by the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. We don't have a fixed number of neurons. We generate new ones all the time, and what is even more startling is that they can learn. Music that sounds like noise to its first audience will gradually resolve itself into a pattern that can be listened to, not merely heard as cacophony.

Virginia Woolf's novels depict consciousness as stream, "ever-changing impressions that are held together by the thin veneer of identity." Scientific experiments have proven her right. An experience (thought/feeling) lasts no longer than 10 seconds in our short-term memory. So consciousness is constantly beginning anew, "with a new stream. As the modernists anticipated, the permanent-seeming self is actually an endless procession of disjointed impressions." The brain is always being boggled.

There are some brain-teasers that Lehrer doesn't address. The two lobes are equally essential to thought, but don't they also duke it out, with the result that some people seem more dominantly right-brained or left-brained? (Intuitive vs. logical, to summarize crudely.) And what about meditation? Its most adept practitioners can shut down the control-freak busybody self so that streams of impression merely drift by in silence.

All in all, however, this exhilarating book will give you much to think about and make you feel good about your endlessly innovative brain.

Brigitte Frase of Minneapolis also reviews books for the Los Angeles Times.