Jonah Lehrer: "The mind is like music"

The L.A. Times. published a thoughtful -- I might even say outright beautiful -- essay yesterday by Jonah Lehrer, an editor-at-large for the science magazine Seed. Titled "Misreading the mind," the essay argues that the reductionism of today's neuroscience is missing the larger mysteries of the brain and how it works. Lehrer writes:

The mind is like music. While neuroscience accurately describes our brain
in terms of its material facts -- we are nothing but a loom of electricity
and enzymes -- this isn't how we experience the world. Our consciousness, at
least when felt from the inside, feels like more than the sum of its cells.
The truth of the matter is that we feel like the ghost, not like the
machine.

Lehrer wrote Proust Was a Neuroscientist, a book that is now on my wish list. It reminds me of another book that piqued my interest and was mentioned in a recent New Yorker piece (about which I have lots of questions and comments you'll hear about later): Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf. Proust seems to be the prince of prose these days. I can just taste the madeleine on my tongue as I type this...