A recent edition of Wired had a fascinating interview with Jonah Lehrer on how science can benefit from the arts.

Jonah Lehrer wants scientists to bone up on the classics. A former neuroscience lab drone, the 26-year-old Rhodes scholar would devour pages of Marcel Proust’s “Swann’s Way” whenever he wasn’t spinning down DNA. In the process, he made a discovery: Artists have something to teach researchers. In his new book, “Proust Was a Neuroscientist”, Lehrer argues that many artists have foretold the scientific future — Proust revealed the inaccuracy of memory, chef Auguste Escoffier anticipated the fifth taste sensation we now call umami, and post-impressionist Paul Cézanne proved that the brain fills in what a painting doesn’t show.

This is a lovely illustration of what happens when two sectors collide. Another example is the programme in New Zealand which resulted in a book called “Are Angels OK?” One review of this book by David Clark summed it up thus :

Scientists and musicians, and scientists and artists have worked well together in the past. Thus a successful alliance between scientists and fiction writers is not perhaps as strange as it might first appear. Both science and writing are creative endeavours. Both require considerable imagination, and the courage to “think the unthinkable” (although scientists are denied the luxury afforded writers of fiction of “thinking the impossible”). After this successful experiment, perhaps we will see more examples of the coming together of creative individuals from different fields of human endeavour.