MODERNISM AND THE MIND—AND A BOOK RECOMMENDATON.

MODERNISM AND THE MIND—AND A BOOK RECOMMENDATION. Almost two years ago, I posted here on how Proust seemed to have anticipated some of the findings of behavioral psychologists described in Daniel Gilbert’s STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS. I then found out and posted that Jonah Lehrer had a book coming out entitled PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST. The book is very rewarding. Lehrer has lots of insights from neuroscience on writers and artists such as Proust, Whitman, Cezanne, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. As an example, Lehrer writes that: “this vision of a mercurial mind, a self divided against itself, was one of the central tenets of modernism.” Lehrer illustrates this proposition with citations to Nietszche, Rimbaud, William James, Freud and T.S. Eliot. And then he connects it all to neuroscience.