An author seeking a book subject came to the realization that art is a mirror of human development!

And wasn't "The Fly" really about stem cell research?

and am surprised it is a new concept.

(DAMN! I should have realized this and written the damn book FIRST)

It makes sense, since most men who work on technical things do not see the forest for the trees.

Few men are intellectually gifted generalists, like Da Vinci was, who can absorb lots of information, glean out the underlying laws, and then posit extensions of those laws onto other things, or even make unobvious leaps of logic.

Mencken was quite right in "In Defense of Women" in calling most guys dumb all-but-robotic louts who putter thru their mindless, simpleton jobs day-in and day-out.

Solutions I have come up with include-- possibly the FIRST practical technology by which we can reach neighboring stars within our lifetimes, a theory describing how it is we know someone is about to call us that is based in straight physics, and a remarkable (1 in millions) alignment of the Great Pyramids with another major feature on Earth that noone else has seen, among many other things.

Since I thus place myself in the category of guys like those the author mentions, I myself need to post my concepts online to garner the credit before anyone else comes up with the same idea.

the ultimate subjective experience with objective reality.

The author and the critic seem well matched. Jonathan is no Keats.

Did novelist George Eliot anticipate the ability of the brain to grow new cells?

October 2005 NORML press release:

Baltimore, MD: The administration of synthetic cannabinoids promotes the proliferation of newborn neurons (nerve cells) in the rat brain which likely accounts for the drug's anti-anxiety and mood elevating effects, according to preclinical trial data published today in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Seriously though (although the above research certainly is serious) -- about art and science -- the best talk I ever heard on the subject was by Czech immunologist/poet Miroslav Holub at the Aspen Writer's Conference.

Science deals only with measurable reality. It's good for sharpening the mind, for training one to be precise and disciplined in one's descriptions of the world.

Then you take that sharpened mind and let go of mere physical reality and you write a poem about flypaper that ends with the line "Arbeit Macht Frei."

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."

Truth? People like to throw that word around a bit, but what does it really mean? If it means, "that which is measurable," well, you measure it, you find the truth. If it means, "that which is unmeasurable," then you can't measure it, and maybe you should call it "belief," or "faith," and not "truth."

I get tired of hearing these platitudes bandied about as though they're self-obvious and tautological. In point of fact, it wasn't religious faith or philosophy that landed a roving craft on the planet Mars. Christianity can't make a testable prediction or a falsifiable claim.

I don't care how long you pray, God isn't going to tell you how to design a circuit or how to cure cancer. For that matter, praying can't feed the world's hungry. That takes money and hard work. Yet, even given this complete lack of any sort of practical result, people persist in this delusion that religion has some bearing on truth.

So, well meaning people will cop-out, and say that the bible contains wisdom. Sure, it contains great wisdom. On the other hand, it contains some of the most vile and unspeakable acts ever recorded throughout history. Acts of genocide, casual mysogeny, and a petty tyrant of a God that behaves like a spoiled 2 year old. Please, spare the world your wisdom and truth. We can't take much more of it before it kills us all.

I'm so old, I remember when it was enough just to argue about whether or not a particular artist was a GENIUS. And the beauty part was that you didn't have to have a doctorate in neuroscience to join the argument.

this book were better. Unlike Keats I do appreciate Lehrer's central argument that the work of great artists can tell us as much 'truth' about the nature of reality as can scientists. He does make his point best with Proust's musings on the nature of memory, but all-in-all the tone sounds like college-level over-reaching (I know because I did a lot of it). I looked forward most to the chapter on Gertrude Stein's linguistics theory - but was very disappointed. The writing on Escoffier was wonderful in parts, though it didn't always seem that related to Lehrer's main claim.