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Tuesday, Nov 20, 2007 12:42 PM UTC

“Proust Was a Neuroscientist”

Did novelist George Eliot anticipate the ability of the brain to grow new cells? Did chef Auguste Escoffier foretell the science of the palate? Jonah Lehrer thinks so.

By Jonathon Keats

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The world premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” by the Ballets Russes in 1913, featured shouting crowds in fancy dress, and a guest appearance by the French police. While none of that was choreographed, the mayhem was exactly what impresario Sergei Diaghilev sought, and affirmed Stravinsky’s ambition to write music “of daring.” Made famous by the uproar, “The Rite of Spring” entered the repertory, ever rising in popularity. By 1940, Walt Disney had scored it for “Fantasia.”

Igor Stravinsky is one of eight major artists of the 19th and 20th centuries considered in “Proust Was a Neuroscientist,” Jonah Lehrer’s earnest attempt to vindicate the accomplishments of art by demonstrating how great composers and novelists and chefs of the past, from Marcel Proust to George Eliot to August Escoffier, anticipated recent scientific discoveries. “I have chosen them because their art proved to be the most accurate,” Lehrer writes, “because they most explicitly anticipated our science.” Lehrer’s thesis would be indefensible even if his examples were convincing: Accuracy is no standard for art, which can fully justify its worth without recourse to peer review. As it stands, even the rationalist lens of science cannot support Lehrer’s sophomoric project.

So why was Igor Stravinsky a neuroscientist? “Stravinsky’s [musical] malevolence was rooted in a deep understanding of the mind,” Lehrer writes. “He realized that the engine of music is conflict, not consonance. The art that makes us feel is the art that makes us hurt.” This is a reasonable representation of Stravinsky’s artistic strategy in “The Rite of Spring.” The problems for Lehrer begin when he attempts to relate this to neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to discover new patterns, and to be reshaped by them. “[O]ur ability to adapt to new kinds of music,” he claims, “was Stravinsky’s enduring insight … Nothing is difficult forever.” In fact, if one takes seriously Stravinsky’s own stated goals, this shows the composer’s misunderstanding of the mind, and marks the “Rite’s” failure. As his music gradually surrendered difficulty to listeners’ neuroplasticity, it progressively lost its audacity, and, to the extent that daring was its purpose, its effectiveness. Stravinsky specifically sought to thwart such complacency. “To listen is an effort,” he claimed, “and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.” Disney is about ducks.

Not all of Lehrer’s artists are so far off-base, neuroscientifically speaking. Perhaps inspired by his job as a line cook at Le Cirque 2000 — duly noted on the dust jacket together with his work in Nobelist Eric Kandel’s neuroscience lab — Lehrer has included a chapter on the redoubtable fin-de-siècle French chef Auguste Escoffier. Escoffier was a neuroscientist, according to Lehrer, because he invented veal stock. Veal stock is heavy in the amino acid L-glutamate, the basis of MSG, that notoriously savory seasoning that every Chinese restaurant in America denies using. “[Escoffier's] genius was in getting as much L-glutamate on the plate as possible,” Lehrer writes. His cooking anticipated synthetics later scientifically shown to be tasty.

The story of this chemical discovery is not without interest. Since ancient times, the tongue was considered sensitive to only four basic flavors — sweet, sour, salty, bitter — none of which seemed especially present in appetizing victuals such as veal stock and Japanese dashi. This puzzle inspired a lifetime of research by the 20th century chemist Kikunae Ikeda, who ultimately established a place on the tongue for a fifth flavor, umami, and showed that this was the flavor of L-glutamate, the major amino acid from which our bodies are built. “The tongue loves what the body needs,” Lehrer writes. And how does this pertain to Escoffier? “The culture of the kitchen articulated a biological truth of the tongue long before science did because it was forced to feed us,” argues Lehrer. “For the ambitious Escoffier, the tongue was a practical problem, and understanding how it worked was a necessary part of creating delicious dishes.” Lehrer’s point is perfectly valid, but utterly meaningless. Like many cooks before him, Escoffier worked out appealing recipes. Science later determined how they appeal to us (in terms of sensory biology) and proposed, somewhat less convincingly, why they must (by way of evolutionary determinism). To call Escoffier a neuroscientist makes as much sense as to say that anyone who ever encountered an apple falling from a tree anticipated Newtonian gravity.

Lehrer’s ponderings about Escoffier are trivial. His writings about novelists including Proust, Virginia Woolf and George Eliot are disastrous. His treatment of Eliot serves an apt example, since he credits her with anticipating an especially surprising discovery about the brain: neurogenesis, or the ability to grow new neurons. Like the dogma of four flavors, the belief that the mature brain is cellularly complete was long taken for granted, only to be refuted by a scientist working at the margins of her discipline. In this case, the heroine was a postdoc named Elizabeth Gould, who observed rat brains healing themselves. Following years of diligent experimentation, Lehrer writes in his boilerplate Horatio Alger prose, “[t]he textbooks were rewritten: the brain is constantly giving birth to itself.” Which makes him think of Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” in which characters have the startling ability to develop, becoming, by the end of the book, different from who they were at the beginning. “[N]eurogenesis is evidence that we evolved to never stop evolving,” Lehrer writes. “Eliot was right: to be alive is to be ceaselessly beginning.”

Setting aside the fact that Eliot hardly needed to anticipate neurogenesis (or even neuroplasticity) to conjure characters changed by circumstances, the essential question arises: What is the good of saddling Eliot with neuroscience? Lehrer’s reductionist reading of “Middlemarch” strips it of any interest as literature, and denies the value to be found in any work that doesn’t operate as an exemplar of neurogenesis, such as fatalistic “Oedipus Rex.” Lehrer claims affinity for literature, posing himself as a defender of the arts. He is fond of homilies such as, “our reality exists in plural.” If illustration of scientific principles avant la lettre is the best defense to be had for the arts, the arts are better off dead.

Lehrer’s book is worth discussing for this reason: It embodies an approach to the humanities and sciences that threatens the vitality of both. In his coda, Lehrer evokes C.P. Snow, whose 1959 book, “The Two Cultures,” has become the standard reference in any discussion about the “mutual incomprehension” (as Snow phrased it) between these divergent realms. Snow famously proposed a third culture to fill this gap. Lehrer rightly believes that the scientific writings of Richard Dawkins and Brian Greene and Steven Pinker, which have sought to make science accessible to all, have addressed this divide without truly bridging it. He justly says that “[t]here is still no dialogue of equals … [and that] there are many ways of describing reality, each of which is capable of generating truth.” While often artful in their writing, Dawkins and Greene and Pinker show no interest in the arts as such. Theirs is a world understood totally through the scientific method, to the exclusion of literature and music and painting, except to the extent that the arts offer apt imagery, or provide ready-made examples of phenomena in need of scientific explanation.

To address this problem, and perhaps claim Snow’s mantle, Lehrer proposes a fourth culture, one that will “ignore arbitrary intellectual boundaries, seeking to blur the lines that separate.” As an example of this — his only example — Lehrer cites Ian McEwan’s “Saturday,” which has the merit of providing a neurosurgeon as narrator.

There is nothing wrong with McEwan, or with “Saturday,” but by pointing to this novel as an ideal, Lehrer condemns us to a future resembling his revisionist past. Having spent 200 pages arbitrarily and often inaccurately illustrating the sciences with works by artists, he wants artists to become self-conscious illustrators in their own right.

Artists can learn from the sciences, as McEwan has done in researching neurosurgery, and as a latter-day Stravinsky could do by rigorously undermining neuroplasticity. Science is material for the arts and art is material for the sciences, yet each must maintain its own integrity. After all, each has its own virtue: The sciences lift us outside of experience, so that we can more clearly survey it. The arts immerse us in experience, so that we can more fully encounter it. The true third culture is to be found in an educated and interested public, able to embrace each endeavor on its own terms. Enslaving the arts to the sciences, as Lehrer wishes done, will merely diminish two cultures to one.

Jonathon Keats is an artist and writer. His collection of fables, "The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six," was published this year. More Jonathon Keats.

Tuesday, Feb 28, 2012 8:45 PM UTC

Disney’s fat-shaming fail

The mouse misfires with an ambitious, awful health campaign

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

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You wouldn’t think the people whose theme parks feature a binge-eating bear with a honey gut would put itself in the business of fat shaming, but that’s exactly what Disney did this month. In a boneheaded stab at promoting healthy lifestyle choices, the happiest place on earth became a considerably less hospitable environment when it debuted a new interactive “Habit Heroes” exhibit at Epcot. Guess who the villains were?

A collaboration between Disney and Blue Cross and Blue Shield to help teach kids to “fight bad habits,” the Epcot attraction and tie-in app and Web page featured buff, virtuous characters Will Power and Callie Stenics squaring off against nemeses like the lazy, grotesque “Lead Bottom” and the self-explanatorily named “Glutton.” Apparently, when a company famed for its meticulous crafting of exactly what children want and one of the largest health insurers in the nation pool their talents, they come up with “Fat people are bad.”

Earlier this month, Tony Jenkins, regional market president for Blue Cross and Blue Shield, told the Orlando Sentinel that “Our challenge was to tell that story in a fun, engaging way, which is what Disney does better than anyone.” So imagine Disney’s surprise when some patrons did not take kindly to their “fun, engaging” message. As Weighty Matters blogger and assistant professor of family medicine Dr. Yoni Freedhoff told the Calgary Herald, “It’s so dumbfounding it’s unreal. I just can’t believe somebody out there thought it was a good idea to pick up where the school bullies left off and shame kids on their vacation.” On her “Dances With Fat” blog, Ragen Chastain condemned the “Disney Fat Shame Ride” and admitted she “couldn’t stop the tears” when she’d heard about it. And nutritionist and author Marion Nestle tweeted, agog, “You can’t make this up.”

It didn’t take long for the Magic Kingdom to do some hasty damage control, taking HabitHeroes.com “down for maintenance” and closing the exhibit just three weeks after it launched. The mouse is currently remaining conspicuously silent on whether it will return.

With 12.5 million children and teens now obese, the health problem in this nation is a real and growing one, one that will play in serious long-term health problems like diabetes and heart disease and short-term ones like bullying. Kids – and parents – need direction and encouragement to make healthy eating choices and develop an active lifestyle. But like Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s similarly in your face campaign, the Habit Heroes approach compounded the problem by making it seem like emotional, cultural, genetic and economic factors can be overcome with simple “Will Power” and a few broccoli spears. Worse, it demonized the obese, equating size with poor habits. Kind of ironic for a place that entices visitors to “Satisfy your sweet tooth at Storybook Treats” or “Wake up with treats like freshly made funnel cakes and delicious waffle sandwiches.” You want to promote good heath? Start by looking at your own sugar and animal fat-laden menus. And go on by respecting children of all shapes and sizes. Because they’re the ones who trust in the mouse to see them not as Lead Bottoms and Gluttons but as princesses and pirates. As beautiful.

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Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Wednesday, Jul 13, 2011 1:05 AM UTC

Can “Winnie the Pooh” save Disney from Pixar?

An utterly charming new adventure with the Bear of Little Brain offers a delicious antidote to digital animation

By Andrew O'Hehir

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Can a Bear of Very Little Brain redeem the tarnished reputation of Walt Disney’s venerable animation studio and stake his place on the cultural landscape alongside Buzz Lightyear and Lightning McQueen? That’s a lot to ask of a tubby little cubbie whose principal concern is finding a pot of honey — sorry, hunny — but Disney’s whimsical and charming new “Winnie the Pooh” feels simultaneously like a return to the company’s more innocent past and a refreshing new direction. Specifically recalling the hand-drawn animation style of the widely beloved 1966 “Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree” and its sequels (anthologized in the 1977 collection “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh”), and delivering only the faintest contemporary tweak to the Milne material, Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall’s “Winnie the Pooh” will thoroughly delight both the under-10 set and their nostalgic parents. Look for this to be a surprisingly potent sleeper hit; I’m going a second time this weekend.

Sterling Holloway, who provided the classic Pooh voice in the ’60s, has been dead almost 20 years, but Jim Cummings (who also voices Tigger) has amiably filled the role in numerous lower-budget Disney productions and sounds uncannily similar. With John Cleese as narrator, Craig Ferguson as Owl and Jack Boulter as Christopher Robin, this production also has the right degree of authentic British-ness. (It’s somehow fine with me that Pooh, along with Bud Luckey’s Eeyore, sounds a bit more American.) But the real star of “Winnie the Pooh” is the imaginative animation, which features not one but two classic Disney surrealist sequences and a bit of playful postmodernism: Pooh frequently interacts with Cleese’s narrator, or wanders out of the Hundred Acre Wood into the paragraphs of the book, accidentally bringing letters and punctuation marks back with him.

Of course the Mouse has been relentlessly cashing in on A.A. Milne’s dimwit ursine hero ever since acquiring the rights from Milne’s widow in 1961, and much of that output doesn’t bear (ha!) thinking about: Piglet and Tigger got their own spinoff movies; there were Christmas and Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day specials and a seemingly endless series of tot-oriented “Winnie the Pooh Learning” and “Winnie the Pooh Playtime” titles. Let’s not even bring up “Franken Pooh.” Well, you can forget about all that stuff; Anderson and Hall have banished the insipid primary colors, not to mention the third-rate outsourced animation, and this film has the lovingly crafted, storybook feeling that was once Disney’s specialty.

“Winnie the Pooh” feels like a turning point in the brief tenure of Walt Disney Animation Studios head John Lasseter — whose other company, Pixar, effectively destroyed Disney’s old in-house animation unit. Lasseter has said frequently that Disney Animation should have its own identity, one that draws on the company’s glorious past and doesn’t simply ape Pixar’s success, and maybe now we can see what that means. “Winnie the Pooh” doesn’t look or feel anything like a Pixar movie, and it is specifically not trying to be a “kidult” crossover success, after the fashion of almost every Pixar production. But it also feels mercifully free of the combined calculation and sloppiness that have plagued so many Disney features in recent years, and one could argue that the painstaking attention to animation and storytelling reflect Lasseter’s stewardship.

Let’s take to the way-back machine for a minute. Ever since the Walt Disney Co. began its partnership with Pixar, then an upstart digital-animation studio run out of an industrial park in Emeryville, Calif., the Mouse’s own in-house animation unit has struggled to keep up. Actually, that’s being euphemistic; what really happened was that Pixar kicked Walt Disney Feature Animation’s butt so badly that the division was ultimately dissolved and renamed. In 1995, “Toy Story,” the first Disney-Pixar release, grossed $354 million worldwide, which represented at least a tenfold return on its production costs. Walt Disney Feature Animation also had a big hit that year with “Pocahontas,” which premiered outdoors in New York’s Central Park and went on to its own $300 million-plus worldwide take. (Mind you, it also cost several times more to make than “Toy Story” did.)

Not even Lasseter, who co-founded Pixar and directed “Toy Story,” would have predicted 16 years ago that Pixar would go from one massive success to the next, becoming one of the most beloved brands in entertainment history, or that “Pocahontas” was the last big hurrah, or next-to-last, for Walt Disney Feature Animation, which had created such massive hits as “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King.” When Pixar released “Toy Story 2″ in 1999, another huge worldwide hit, WDFA’s big release was “Tarzan,” a wildly expensive production (not to mention an entirely forgettable film) that probably ended up in the red. Disney’s in-house studio had one more sizable hit, with “Lilo & Stitch” in 2002. But that movie earned $100 million less than Pixar’s “Monsters Inc.” had a year earlier and took in less than one-third the worldwide gross of Pixar’s huge 2003 hit, “Finding Nemo.”

At that point the writing was on the wall: Pixar engaged an enormous public with cutting-edge animation technology and appealing characters and stories, and reaped untold billions in box-office receipts, tie-in merchandise and ancillaries. Disney’s in-house animation studio, on the other hand, was an embarrassing albatross. There were straight-to-video quickies, cashing in on existing properties in the most unfortunate Disney tradition: “Mickey’s Twice Upon a Christmas” and “Mulan II” and “Tarzan II” (with “new songs by Phil Collins,” apparently meant as an inducement). The last release under the aegis of Walt Disney Feature Animation was “Chicken Little” in 2005, a work of supremely crappy-looking fake-Pixar animation that features 11 credited writers and Zach Braff in the title role. I would have been happy to completely forget that movie’s existence. (In fact I had, until now).

Lasseter has been at the helm of the reconstituted Walt Disney Animation Studios for almost five years, while continuing to run Pixar, and the results of this seemingly contradictory role are still a bit unclear. The first two Disney features made on his watch, “Meet the Robinsons” and “Bolt,” felt way too much like Pixar movies, with substandard animation and the rough edges sanded off. I’m aware there’s a critical constituency for both films, but that didn’t extend far into the public, and both were box-office flops. With the hand-drawn “Princess and the Frog” and the digital “Tangled,” Disney tried to breathe new life into its classic tradition of adapting fairy tales. Neither performed as well as expected, but they displayed more craft, integrity and audience appeal than any other Disney animated feature in years. (“Tangled” was reportedly so expensive to make that even its worldwide gross of almost $400 million might not have returned a profit; “The Princess and the Frog” failed to click with American audiences but did well overseas.)

It’s almost not worth mentioning that “The Princess and the Frog” was artistically and financially eclipsed by Pixar’s “Up,” and that “Tangled” was obliterated by the astonishing billion-dollar worldwide gross of “Toy Story 3,” the biggest animated feature in history. The same thing is likely happen again this summer; even though many Pixar-friendly critics have turned against Lasseter’s “Cars 2,” audiences don’t seem to mind. But coming as it does after those two films, “Winnie the Pooh” feels like more than a small summer surprise that will utterly charm 3-year-olds and 93-year-olds. It feels like a Walt Disney animated film, in the best possible sense of that term, and another significant step toward restoring that company’s dignity and sense of purpose.

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Tuesday, Jun 28, 2011 12:29 PM UTC

Pixar releases trailer for upcoming film, “Brave”

The movie, which comes to theaters next summer, is a fairy tale set in the Scottish Highlands

By Emma Mustich

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Pixar releases trailer for upcoming film,

The heroine of Pixar's forthcoming film, "Brave."

The big box office news this past weekend was the success of Pixar’s latest release, “Cars 2,” in the face of less-than-friendly critics. In the wake of this triumph, the studio has released the trailer for its next film, “Brave,” which is due to hit theaters next June.

The movie — which takes place far from “Cars’s” Radiator Springs, in the Scottish Highlands — brings us Pixar’s first-ever female protagonist: a flame-haired princess called Merida. Entertainment Weekly has more:

It’s Pixar Animation Studio’s first fairy tale fantasy, and it marks yet another change of pace for the venerable dream factory. “What we want to get across [with the teaser] is that this story has some darker elements,” director Mark Andrews tells EW. “Not to frighten off our Pixar fans — we’ll still have all the comedy and the great characters. But we get a little bit more intense here.”

The film will use the voices of Emma Thompson, Billy Connolly, Julie Walters, Kevin McKidd, Craig Ferguson and Robbie Coltrane, and stars Kelly Macdonald as Merida.

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Emma Mustich is a Salon contributor. Follow her on Twitter: @emustich. More Emma Mustich.

Thursday, Jun 23, 2011 4:41 PM UTC

Today’s must-see viral videos

Watch: America gets its Susan Boyle, a Southwest pilot's anti-gay rant, a touching Ryan Dunn tribute, and more

By Drew Grant

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Landau Eugene Murphy Jr. wows audiences on "America's Got Talent."

1. The U.S. gets its own Susan Boyle

“America’s Got Talent” contestant Landau Eugene Murphy Jr., a car washer from West Virginia, was chided by Piers Morgan for chewing gum onstage. Then he opened his mouth so the ghost of Frank Sinatra could come out singing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Goosebumps!

2. A tribute to Ryan Dunn that will last a lifetime

“Jackass’” Wee-Man, (aka Jason Acuna) cuts through all the anger and flame wars surrounding his friend’s death and gives him a uniquely touching memorial.

3. Southwest Airlines pilot loses it on the mic

I don’t know if it makes it better or worse that this guy’s homophobic tirade was supposed to be a private cockpit conversation instead of being broadcast across the entire Texas airspace. Maybe he should get a job doing standup in Nashville?

4. Culture clash

Amazing footage, just uploaded to YouTube yesterday, of a tribe in Papua New Guinea meeting a white man for the first time in 1976.

5. Trippy Disney mashup

Pogo, the foremost expert and creator of Disney remixes, has come out with his latest creation. “Bloom” focuses not on one specific film, but several different animated classics.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.

Thursday, Jun 2, 2011 7:03 PM UTC

Are we OK with Miley Cyrus in her underwear now?

Is the former Disney star old enough, at 18, to strip down without it becoming a scandal?

By Drew Grant

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Are we OK with Miley Cyrus in her underwear now?

Miley in her everyday outfit for "So Undercover."

Miley Cyrus … can I ever look at you without feeling like a lecherous old man? From the time you were 15 and appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair wearing only a sheet, it’s been a battle not to see you partially clothed everywhere I go.

Sometimes you’re just the victim of a bad situation, like when those hackers leaked racy photos you took in 2008 for Joe Jonas, and posted them all over the Internet. Or when this happened again in 2010 and the FBI was called in.

Other times, you’re shoving your post-Hannah Montana B-cups in my face so hard that I can almost hear you screaming, “I’m an adult now! Take me and my breasts seriously!” For example: your music videos for “Can’t Be Tamed.” Or “Who Owns My Heart.“ Or when you pretended to kiss one of your female dancers on “Britain’s Got Talent.” And that’s not even mentioning those party shots of you involving lap dances, salvia and more half-naked, girl-on-girl kissing. Which has less to do with your sexuality, Miley, and more with the fact that you were 17 and acting like Paris Hilton on a bender.

So please forgive me for feeling weird about these new, semi-innocuous stills for your latest film “So Undercover.” If it weren’t for your dramatic history with underwear, these photos wouldn’t seem so bad. But with you Miley, the pictures carry three years of associated guilt and anxiety that the government is going to come arrest me for having child pornography on my computer.

You’re 18 now, which is the age when the sexy vs. too sexy debate usually begins to get interesting for Op-Ed writers and TV pundits. But you’ve been scandalized and scandalizing for awhile now; you’ve made your stance clear about rebelling from your Disney image, and at this point it’s barely news when you walk out of your house in only lingerie. If anything, these photos for “So Undercover” are way more conservative than the bra and short-shorts you’ve been wearing to the supermarket for the past 24 months. (The Supermarket is a hot new club in London, FYI.)

But it still feels weird. Legal, but weird.

Then again, maybe I should just be glad you’re so fond of underwear that you literally spend $3K at a time shopping for panties and bras. It will really cut down on the number of paparazzi upskirt photos we’ll have to see in the future.

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Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant.