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For this week, I took at look at Jonah Lehrer's book entitled Proust Was a Neuroscientist, which posits and explicates the notion that great neurobiological discoveries were already woven into the text and art of individuals like Gertrude Stein, Cezanne, Walt Whitman, and Proust. My attention was drawn to his book, which I had wanted to read for a while, as I stumbled across his Feb. 5th article entitled "Borges Was a Neuroscientist" in The Frontal Cortex. I find the general thesis very compelling - that poets and artists are practitioners of "loopy science" in making sets of observations, generating conclusions, and constructing experiments of mind, aesthetic, and text. Lehrer, on Whitman, writes about his investigative poetic and reflective strategies: "Whitman got this theory of bodily feelings from his investigations of himself. All Whitman wanted to do in Leaves of Grass was put 'a person, a human being (myself, in the later half of the Nineteenth Century, in America) freely, fully and truly on record.' And so the poet turned himself into an empiricist, a lyricist of his own experience. As Whitman wrote in the preface to Leaves of Grass, 'You shall stand by my side to look in the mirror with me.'" Whitman identified Professor Grobstein's theory that "brain = behavior" indirectly as he textually acknowledges the inextricability of body and mind, as "he was the first poet to write poems in which the flesh was not a stranger." Lehrer suggests that even the formalist stylings of Whitman's verse - his "unmetered form" - functions as a manifestation of his neurobiological findings and "the urges of his anatomy."

In the short article "Borges was a Neuroscientist," Lehrer reviews neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga's new homage to Borges, which praises the writer's neurobiological intuition (excerpt below).

In the story of Funes, Borges described very precisely the problems of distorted memory capacities well before neuroscience caught up...In a study using electrodes to probe the hippocampus in epileptic patients for clinical reasons, we identified a type of neuron that fires in response to particular abstract concepts. For example, one neuron in a patient fired only in recognition of different pictures of the actress Jennifer Aniston; another responded only to images of another celebrity, Halle Berry. It is thus possible that these neurons link perception and memory by creating the abstract encoding we use to store memories -- especially considering that we tend to remember concepts and forget irrelevant details. If these neurons are lacking, the ability to generate abstractions may be limited, leading to pathologies such as autism or characters like Funes.

Even without this scientific knowledge, Borges's intuitive description is sharp: Funes, he wrote, was "virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas ... His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them ... To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars."

If Borges and Proust have stamped out certain neurobiological processes of memory from their own observations and from their own human experiences, how should neuroscientists treat visual art, poetry, fiction? If many answers to biological questions have rested on the shelves of the library, what is the role of text in neurobiology? Should neuroscientists, in search of certain observations about the brain, turn to the literature that has already tackled the problem, and use art as a starting point?