Résumé: This excellent book does two things exceptionally well. It presents 2008 brain science, and marries it seamlessly with art. It has a chapter on Proust - the memory one - about his tome: In Search of Lost Time, coming to the startling conclusion that the more we remember something, the less the memory is real. The book is not a book about Proust, per se, but, has chapters on different artists, for example: Walt Whitman - I Sing the Body Electric - literally; George Eliot, and the biology of chaos theory, and how this presents the ability for us to will our way to new brain cells; Cezanne and his understanding that brains take visual perceptions and impose upon them the need to recognize form, and this results in another unsettling truth: we see what we want to see; and, Auguste Escoffier, the French chef who discovered that glutamate - yes, really, MSG - from rendered animals and plants, is the key to all of smell.

Other chapters include Igor Stravinsky who introduced the 20th century of music dissonance and atonality by trying to change all the old rules about how classical music should sound and progress, harmonically, that the mind rebels at newness but soon it becomes, familiar, trusted and wished for; Gertrude Stein and her unending battle to write language without its form, essentially random gibberish, but had to concede that no matter how much she tried, underneath it all there was the structure of grammar - Chomsky's universal grammar; and, Virginia Woolf and how her stream of consciousness novels reveal our emerging selves, in that the odd notion that we exist only in so far as our attention is focused on perception is true, and thus the self exists only in these moments, though we experience it as an ongoing river through time; the self exists for 10 second lengths before short term memory collapses and attention makes the next splinter seem joined as though seamlessly.

This 'lad' has managed to put in his brain more science and art than most people manage in a lifetime. And he expresses it so clearly that when you hit hard, dry, stuff like quantum mechanics, you go, oh, so that is what that means. The book is endlessly brainy, inventive, charmingly erudite, and at the same time cracklingly readable. I say this as a person with one of my degrees in biochemistry and who has been a poet for more than 30 years. I am in the process of writing a book on the brains of poets, (see dcreid.ca), and have read tons on these subjects. This is wonderfully well wrought stuff about difficult things to understand.