As Jonah Lehrer demonstrates in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, when it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first. Taking a group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists—a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists—Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the mind that neuroscience is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George El...