Jonah Lehrer's "Proust Was a Neuroscientist"

This is a wonderful set of essays that examine the interrelationship between science and art. Specifically it claims that "This book is about artists who anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience. It is about writers and pointers and composes who discovered truths about the human mind -- real, tangible truths -- that science is only now rediscovering." It looks at eight artists: Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Wolfe. Apparantly the author worked as a doctoral student in a neurologist's lab before deciding that a PhD in the field was not for him, so his science is excellent. Remarkably, his artistic knowledge and sensibility is first rate as well. This makes an excellent read.

The following fails to give you the delightful artistic insights of the book. But I find it interesting as a bit of debunking of expertise:

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited fifty-seven wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn't stop the experts from describing the "red" wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its "jamminess," while another enjoyed its "crushed red fruit." Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was labeled as a fancy Grand Cur. The other bottle was labeled as an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The Grand Cru was "agreeable, woody, complex, balanced, and rounded," while the vin du table was "weak, short, light, flat, and faulty." Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only twelve said the cheap wine was.