Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Reality is a product of the most august imagination.

The artist describes what the scientist can't

As Woolf liked to remind herself, "Let us not take it for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small."

"We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself

All music needs is a violated pattern, an order interrupted by a disorder, for in that acoustic friction, we hallucinate a feeling. Music is that feeling. The Rite of Spring was the first symphonic work to celebrate this fact. It is the sound of art changing the brain

realized that the engine of music is conflict, not consonance

The mind is not a camera. As Cézanne understood, seeing is imagining

The more you remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes

Science has long known that our sensitivity to certain smells and tastes varies by as much as 1,000 percent between individuals

The taste of most flavors is smell