How our senses bring back memories
We all remember this famous moment in the animation ‘Ratatouille’ when Anton Ego, a harsh culinary critic, after tasting the dish that inspired the title of the movie suddenly softens and flashes back to his childhood memories.
Ratatouille becomes a real-time vehicle, a machine that takes Anton from the grounds of frustrating grown-up present straight into a warm, and surprisingly not even hazy, past.
This same, slightly different on a level of detail, story is presented in Proust’s Swan’s way. Here it is not ratatouille that conveys a memory wave, but a small cookie with a fashionable name ‘madeleine’.
The story goes in a similar way. A madeleine dipped in tea involuntarily triggers a wave of memories in character. It is this experience of involuntary recollections that causes Marcel to achieve happiness. This sensation then, according to Proust, can be achieved through reliving the past, surrounding with the reality of what’s gone thanks to the power of safeguarding eternity of mind.
Flashbacks evoked by a particular experience of taste or smell have been described as ‘Proust’s effect’, and the term has become a common point of interest among psychologists and philosophers.
But let’s stop here to dive deeper into the science behind involuntary flashbacks. Involuntary autobiographical memories are explicit memories of personal events that come to mind spontaneously. But how exactly can memories be retrieved without conscious effort? According to Berntsen’s research, when something reminds us of a past memory, it’s usually because there’s something similar between what’s happening now and what happened before. This is called “encoding specificity,” and it means that the more similar the two things are, the more likely we are to remember the past event involuntarily.
However, as Berntsen points out, it is not a sufficient explanation. If it was, the act of repeating patterns on a daily basis (such as wearing the same t-shirt) would constantly trigger involuntary recollections. Subsequently, one might wonder why this one particular memory is retrieved, as they may exist other memories settled in similar circumstances. Let’s illustrate that. Suppose John is doing spring garage cleaning. Suddenly, he notices an old baseball ball. Out of the blue, he involuntarily recalls a game from his senior year of high school.
According to the studies, external cues are the most frequently reported during the activation of involuntary memory. Those include surroundings, objects, etc. We might wonder, though, given that John was a baseball player throughout his whole high school and college, why did he recall this one particular game?
Berntsen suggests that in order to trigger a memory of something that happened in the past, a specific feature (or a combination of features) needs to be unique enough to distinguish it from other possibilities. The more unique an association is, the more likely the memory will be retrieved. In the example of a baseball player, maybe the ball he picked up was the same one he used in that particular game?
Coming back to Proust’s effect, Van Campen makes an interesting point concerning the age of a person during the time memory was created.
The “early reminiscence bump” refers to the phenomenon where people tend to remember more events from their childhood between the ages of 3 and 10 years. Since young children often have limited narrative abilities, their memories rely more heavily on sensory information, which explains why recollections triggered by senses are more common for childhood events. Additionally, these sensory memories are easier to access than those triggered by verbal cues.
Neuroscience can benefit greatly from Proust’s work. I would be happy to dive deeper into the topic.
Learn more:
References:
Van Campen, Cretien. (2014). The Proust Effect. The Senses as Doorways to Lost Memories. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199685875.001.0001.
Rubin, David C, and Dorthe Berntsen. “The frequency of voluntary and involuntary autobiographical memories across the life span.” Memory & cognition vol. 37,5 (2009): 679–88. doi:10.3758/37.5.679
Berntsen D. „Involuntary autobiographical memories and their relation to other forms of spontaneous thoughts.” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 376, 20190693. (doi:10.1098/rstb.2019.0693
