Jonah Lehrer, Rhodes Scholar, author and Seed magazine editor, comes to the Clinton School Tuesday, March 18, at 6 p.m., to give the talk, “Kanye West was a Neuroscientist,” which might be a preview of his next book. His first, published last fall, is “Proust Was a Neuroscientist,” where he argued that art often presages science.
From a Wired profile/interview.
Proust revealed the inaccuracy of memory, chef Auguste Escoffier anticipated the fifth taste sensation we now call umami, and post-impressionist Paul Cézanne proved that the brain fills in what a painting doesn’t show.
Here’s the gist of the Kanye argument:
He’s making use of the same musical principles as Beethoven, the same idea of building toward a pattern but then denying the listener that pattern by injecting randomness, because that unexpectedness is what your auditory cortex really craves.
I’m there.