Abstract
Marcel Proust’s reflective autobiographical novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu1 (1913–1927) contains one of the most iconic descriptions of ‘involuntary memory’, or cued recall, in literature. Proust famously relates how vivid memories of his childhood home and surroundings are invoked after sipping a spoonful of tea mixed with soaked crumbs of a ‘petite madeleine’, a sweet buttery French cake, that his mother had provided one cold winter’s day. He recalls that, when visiting his invalid Aunt Léonie in her bedroom on Sunday mornings, she would offer him a madeleine soaked in tea. This memory, seemingly invoked by tasting the same tea-soaked madeleine combination, then brings forth a flood of remembered sights and sounds from his childhood.
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Notes
Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, eds. (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 46. Author’s Translation.
In fact, a colleague of Pavlov’s, Dr Zitovich, had already shown that dogs have to learn to recognize sights and smells of food, so salivation to those stimuli is already an acquired or conditioned response: see I.P. Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex, trans. G.V. Anrep (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927).
Numerous surveys, as well as experimental studies, have demonstrated that some people (‘comfort eaters’, perhaps a minority of the population) will eat more food, and particularly sweet fatty foods, when experiencing negative emotions (reviewed in E.L. Gibson, ‘The Psychobiology of Comfort Eating: Implications for Neuropharmacological Interventions’, Behavioural Pharmacology 23 (2012), 442–460). Sadly, the recent finding that the more depressed you are, the more chocolate you eat, implies that (Californian) chocolate is not a good antidepressant in the longer term (N. Rose, S. Koperski, and B.A. Golomb, ‘Mood Food: Chocolate and Depressive Symptoms in a Cross-Sectional Analysis’, Archives of Internal Medicine 170(8) (2010), 699–703.
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© 2016 E. Leigh Gibson
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Gibson, E.L. (2016). Proust Recalled: A Psychological Revisiting of That Madeleine Memory Moment. In: Groes, S. (eds) Memory in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_4
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