In his recent, acclaimed book, Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer argues that “any description of the brain requires both … art and science” (x). He ends by urging the development of a “fourth culture” that “will freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities” (196). Lehrer discusses memory, vision, language, and other topics – including emotion – that have been well explored by the neurosciences. Unfortunately, he does not quite show that “any description of the brain requires both … art and science.” He discusses eight artists with insight and sensitivity. He explores neuroscientific research on a range of topics in a lucid and rigorous way. But it is never clear that the artists are contributing to the science. It is not even clear that Proust and others “had predicted” subsequent “experiments” or “anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience” (vii). After all, they were not designing experiments or formulating general theories. If the point is just that artists implicitly got the facts right about seeing, and other things, then we are all neuroscientists. We all get the facts right, for we are all living examples of how perceptual, memory, and emotion systems work.

On the other hand, as Lehrer shows, novelists, painters, and musicians sometimes depicted or appealed to aspects of human perception, thought, feeling, or memory in ways that were more complex and accurate than the standard views of their contemporaries, including scientists. In this way, they anticipated something about our more recent views, something important for science.