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.
Keywords
- Conditioned Stimulus
- Unconditioned Stimulus
- Autobiographical Memory
- Vivid Memory
- Autobiographical Recall
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
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.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 E. Leigh Gibson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-56642-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52058-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)