Jonah Lehrer On The Taste of Neuroscience
The soul-crushingly young Jonah Lehrer was at Town Hall last night, his mere presence deriding our wasted time on the planet. At 25, he's been a line cook, a lab tech, and a Rhodes Scholar, and he's now an author (Proust Was a Neuroscientist), editor-at-large for SEED, and of course a blogger. (We were a pantry chef one night, and we learned how to "make" a crème brûlée with a propane blowtorch, but so far no Rhodes Scholarship, no book deal.) By contrast, Lou Dobbs was upstairs, giving inspiration for late-in-life windbags/rabble-rousers, so perhaps it evened out.
Our Bostonist compatriots just interviewed him, and there he mentions the great theme of his book, which is that 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." Painting, Lehrer said, is in essence a dialogue with your visual cortex: what shape looks good, why does that color work best, and so on.
Although the book's figures range from Whitman and Proust to Woolf and Cezanne, last night Lehrer spoke in a subdued, on-autopilot way about Auguste Escoffier, a giant of French cuisine. Escoffier is one of Lehrer's "case studies" on how rigorous introspection of firsthand, subjective experience can clue us into our neurobiology decades before anyone can get around to finding the science to support it. In Escoffier's case, his cuisine-based art didn't so much touch a nerve as an undiscovered tastebud.
Escoffier's "classic combination" was mixing protein-rich stock with deglazing. Made into a sauce or gravy, the taste of this concoction makes the average person's eyes roll back in their head. Yet at the time, there was no good reason to think it would -- it wasn't until 1907 that Kikunae Ikeda, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, began his experimenting that would lead him to a taste that wasn't sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. It was umami, and it was the taste of glutamate. When unraveled (through deglazing), glutamate's taste makes the tongue go "Yes, yes, oh god, YES!"
And that is why people will even eat Marmite, "a waste product of industrial brewing, a sludge left from the fermentation of yeast and sugars, stabilised by the addition of salt."
Lehrer's meta-theme is that "we're too often in the position of saying we're nothing but scientific description, even though a third-person description can never capture our first-person experience. Neuroscience can't disregard the only experience we will actually know." Artists, as "acute students of subjective first-person reality," not only provide a rigorously studied missing perspective, they "help scientists ask better questions." In return, of course, artists who find inspiration in science find new narratives -- Lehrer pointed how Capgras syndrome features in Richard Powers' novel, The Echo Maker.
