Interview: Jonah Lehrer, Author

The actions of these authors, painters, and chefs seem very deliberate in their approach to art, as if they went into their work with a specific theory in mind. But how can you know for sure that's how, say, Virginia Woolf approached her work?

That was an easy one because she loved her diary. That was one of the things that surprised me while writing the book was just how rigorous all these artists were, how seriously they took their own art. George Eliot said her novels were a set of experiments in life. Whitman read brain textbooks of the day and then would write poetry. All these artists took their art very, very seriously. They didn't think they were writing pretty things or beautiful things or making something entertaining or diverting. They thought they were expressing something important, something true about human nature and the human condition. And that's something that surprised me. I don't think we see art in the terms that Virginia Woolf saw her art anymore.
Regarding the diaries, especially the Proust chapter, did you ever think that maybe the artists' theories were formulated in hindsight?

I tried not to do too much psychoanalysis. I'd be the last person to be able to tease out Virginia Woolf's true motivations or what Proust was really up to. I tried to begin with the work itself and tried not to spend too much time trying to parse apart their deeper motives and their deeper messages. I just tried to begin with To the Lighthouse or In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past) or Song of Myself, and try to take that and interpret that and flesh out the chapters with biographical details. I tried to make the centerpiece of each chapter the thing itself, the painting or the symphony, or in Escoffier's case, the cookbook. Obviously, the work of art is inseparable from the person behind it. I try to only bring in biographical details where it was relevant. I talk about Virginia Woolf's mental illness, which she talks about a lot in her diary, but I talk about it in context of how it informed the work of art, how that led her to be more introspective about her own life. She's always watching out for symptoms of madness. That informed her very methodical interpretation of her own brain.

How and when did you start developing your interdisciplinary approach?

It was born of indecision. I was a double major in college. I loved novels and neuroscience. I couldn't pick one. I was lucky enough to work in a great neuroscience lab for several years and had great mentors. There's lots of down time in a neuroscience lab. You're always waiting for an experiment to finish, so I'd bring in novels to read. I was assigned Proust for a literature class. We only had to read Swann's Way, but I really got swept away by the soap opera of it. It's really good melodrama at its core, a love story. So I spent a few months reading Proust while waiting for an experiment to finish, and that's when I first had the idea that Proust had anticipated my experiment with memory. The lab I worked at was studying the chemistry of memory, what happens to the brain when you make a memory. I began reading Proust and couldn't help but see connections to what I was doing in the lab.

How did you get into cooking? We know a few scientists--and their culinary skill stops with grilled cheese.

There were some funny days when I would work in both. I would work in the kitchen and go to the lab, and that's when you start to appreciate the similarities of manual labor when you're chopping up onions and you're chopping up sea slug neurons. You tend to appreciate some of the odd parallels. I began working in kitchens just in high school as a prep cook, the lowest on the totem pole. You chop onions and carrots and pull meat out of lobster claws, all that very basic stuff. I did it in the summer for cash, and then I worked in college at a couple of restaurants in New York City. I also did it for the pocket money. I loved it. I grew to really enjoy being in the kitchen--the adrenaline, you kind of get in the zone, so to speak, during dinner rush.

Have you considered returning to that line of work?

Oh, gosh. Too difficult. It is a hard life, being on your feet for a long, long time. You're sore, you get burns on your hands … I still love cooking. I love after a day spent playing with words, there's nothing I enjoy more than making a bowl of pasta. So I still love cooking, but I don't think I'll be returning to it anytime soon. If I can't hack it as a writer, I guess that's always an option--go back to being a line cook!

So, being a writer is how you would describe your primary line of work right now?

I was hardly a chef, just a line cook. And I was just a technician in a lab. I was one of the line cooks of the lab. You do the manual labor and lots of the cooking, but the ideas aren't necessarily yours. I worked for a really great post-doc, Kausik Si, who really taught me a lot about the scientific method and the process and the way science is done. But, yeah, I'm definitely a writer. I excelled at experimental failure. I quickly learned I wasn't that good of a scientist.

OK. This might be a little off-track, but you're the guy who would have the answer, and we've wanted to know. In the Escoffier chapter, you had mentioned that MSG headaches aren't real. How would you explain them?

Jeffrey Steingarten, the Vogue food writer, has a great essay. You don't want to ridicule someone's headache or not take it seriously, but it's hard to find an actual connection between MSG (monosodium glutamate) and headaches. That said, it does make a little bit of sense because glutamate is a neurotransmitter. We have glutamate receptors in our brains, so it's easy to see, and this may have been when the initial confusion arose. Scientists perhaps saw MSG and said we have glutamate receptors in our brains, so this is where you're getting your headache from, that MSG was neurochemically active in the brain. It's not quite an urban legend, but there doesn't seem to be scientific support for it. Steingarten is a much more informed source on Chinese food and headaches.

Back to taste, what can we learn from Proust and his Madeline?

There was one section of the book where I first had the idea of wow, that was interesting. He dunked the cookie in the tea, and he recovers his childhood memory. It's a great scene. And then right after he recovers his memory, he warns you, "Don't trust your memory." You struggle in vain to recover the stories of your past. They're actually fictions. Your memories are dishonest. I just read a science paper which has just come out about the technical term reconsolidation--every time you remember something, you create that memory anew. It's that juxtaposition of having the science paper in my short-term memory and then reading Proust and this very modern, very prophetic section about just how dishonest our memory is. Our memories are designed to always feel true, and yet if you look at the literal level of our brain cells, when you remember a memory, you change the memory. The old model of memory was that our memories were like photographs or something you put away in a file cabinet. When you remember something, you take that memory out and--presto!--it hasn't changed. You recover it just like it happened.

But the neuroscience of remember is much more complicated than that. Every time you remember something, you're slightly distorting the memory itself, tweaking at the margins, fiddling with it, making it a little bit different.

At the end of the book, you mention Ian McEwan's Saturday as a work of literature that helps to create a fourth culture between the humanities and the sciences. Are there any other works that you've read that make that connection?

Absolutely. Richard Powers, The Echo Maker, is about a real neurological syndrome. He turns this obscure neurological syndrome into a much larger meditation on the self and the limits of neuroscience and the importance of emotion and love--all these grand themes. It's another perfect example of a book which could be assigned as a springboard to explore an aspect of the mind which is best explored by art.

I should be clear that it's not just novels and art that are somehow rooted in science that can contribute to our understanding. The larger point I try to make in the book is that the reason we're still reading Homer or Shakespeare and still looking at Jackson Pollack is that the art feels true to us. It still resonates. It still feels meaningful. It still touches literally some nerve in us. I think by reverse-engineering the art, by trying to figure out why this art means so much to us, why great art is so great, why we're still so riveted by it, I think we can learn a lot about the way the mind works. To contribute to our understanding of ourselves, I don't think art needs to incorporate the latest science. It's also really interesting, and I wish it happened more often, but I don't think it's the only way to foment an interaction between the two cultures. Great art embodies an aspect of us, reflects some aspect of us. That's why we still go to see Hamlet.