Ithaca College

Best-selling science author Jonah Lehrer will deliver the annual C. P. Snow Lecture on Tuesday, April 6 at 7:30 p.m. in Textor 102.  This talk will look at the work of successful artists in order to learn about human nature and the quirks of the brain.

"The Future of Science is Art, or What We Can Learn About the Brain From Marcel Proust, A 19th Century Chef, and Kanye West"

Jonah Lehrer

Tuesday, April 6, 7:30pm
Textor 102

Free and Open to the Public

A book signing will precede the lecture, at 7pm.

Can art teach us about the mind? Modern neuroscience rightfully adheres to a strict methodology -- seeking to understand the brain in terms of its most basic parts -- but this method could benefit from an additional set of inputs. (As the novelist Richard Powers wrote, "If we knew the world only through synapses, how could we know the synapse?") This is where art comes in. Artists, on one definition, study the world of experience. They describe the mind from the inside, expressing our first-person perspective in prose, poetry, paint and yes, even cookbook recipes. While a work of art is not a substitute for a scientific experiment, the artist can help neuroscientists better understand what, exactly, they are trying to reduce in the first place. Before one breaks something apart, it helps to know how that thing hangs together.

Biographical Information
Jonah Lehrer is a Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. He graduated from Columbia University and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He has written for The New Yorker, Nature, Seed, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. He is also a Contributing Editor at Scientific American Mind and National Public Radio's Radio Lab.