What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life (23 page)

Roger Shattuck identifies yet another French source of Proust’s inspiration. In 1896 the philosopher Henri Bergson published
Matter and Memory,
a treatise on psychology that gained wide public attention. The nature of memory was at the core of Bergson’s psychology, and he stressed in particular “pure or spontaneous memory,” i.e., personal memories that survive in the unconscious for a long time before being recovered. The similarity to Proust’s involuntary memory was obvious enough that Proust was asked about it in an interview in 1913. He denied being influenced by Bergson, a denial that Shattuck says “can only be termed ingenuous.”

Marc Weiner, a professor of Germanic Studies at Indiana University, offers the sinister speculation that Proust lifted the tea-and-madeleine idea from Richard Wagner. When the composer was exiled from Germany for his political activities, he was unable to find any authentic zwieback biscuits. This led to a severe creative blockage while he was working on
Tristan und Isolde.
One day he received a shipment of real zwieback from Mathilde Wesendonk, his muse and platonic lover. In a letter, Wagner tells her (tongue-in-cheek) of the miraculous effects of her care package; how, when dipped in milk, the zwieback cured his writer’s block and inspired him to move ahead with the opera. The Wagner-Wesendonk letters were widely read at the turn of the century; a French edition was published in 1905, eight years before
Swann’s Way.
Weiner mischievously suggests that Proust’s madeleine-soaking was inspired by Wagner’s zwieback-dunking.

The Proust Boosters

Though Proust’s notion of smell memory isn’t very original, that hasn’t stopped psychologists from adopting it with enthusiasm. The first researcher to charge forth under the banner of the soggy madeleine was Brown University’s Trygg Engen. In a 1973 paper in the
Journal of Experimental Psychology,
he said, “The Proustian view is that odors are not forgotten to the same extent as are other perceptual events. Is there any factual validity for this claim of the artist?” Engen reported that the ability to recognize a set of memorized odors, though not high to begin with, did not drop off much over the course of several weeks. He concluded, “The Proustian insight is validated!” (His exclamation point, not mine.)

Engen’s claim that odor memory doesn’t decay was newsworthy. Mainstream memory theory in the 1970s was based almost exclusively on tests using words or pictures; memory for these stimuli faded according to well-known timetables. Yet from the beginning, smell psychologists assumed that odor memory was unique, a view steeped in conventional wisdom and garnished with anecdotes. Reviewing this period, Judith Annett notes that “negative experimental results were often taken to support the ‘Proustian’ position.” The Proustian consensus that emerged in the 1970s—that odor memory decayed slowly if at all, and was unchanged by later experience—turns out to be wrong on both counts.

Engen’s notion of indelible olfactory memory began to unravel in the 1980s. Heidi Walk and Elizabeth Johns, of Queen’s University in Ontario, observed classic interference effects—smelling a second odor soon after the first makes the first one harder to remember. Others found that rates of forgetting were the same for odors as for sights and sounds. Odor memory appeared “to be governed by the same principles as remembering stimuli in other modalities.” Such principles include interference effects and so-called rehearsal effects (an improvement in memory brought about by verbally describing the to-be-remembered odor). Most subsequent research, as the psychologist Theresa White has pointed out, shows that olfactory memory obeys the same rules as memory in the other senses: it erodes with time and is muddied by subsequent experience. The purity and infallibility of smell memory—an insight central to Proust’s literary conceit—doesn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny.

H
AVING ROLLED SNAKE-EYES
on their first Proustian bet, psychologists pushed their chips onto another. They proposed that personal memories elicited by odor were older and more emotion-laden than those sparked by words or pictures. The new experimental strategy was to give someone a smell, ask him to come up with a personal memory about it, and then rate that memory for age and strength of feeling.

Chief among the second generation of Proust Boosters was Rachel Herz, another Brown University psychologist who in one study asserted that she had produced “the first unequivocal demonstration that naturalistic memories evoked by odors are more emotional than memories evoked by other cues.” Her bold claim deserves a close look. Herz asked people to recall a personal memory after she gave them an odor or a picture. People then rated their memories for emotionality. Picture-prompted memories had lower emotionality scores than odor-prompted ones, giving rise to Herz’s claim. What she glosses over is the fact that both types of memory scored below the midpoint of the rating scale. In other words, visual memory and odor memory were both on the unemotional side of the scale. The odor-cued memories were simply
less unemotional.

The Swedish psychologists Johan Willander and Maria Larsson have failed to confirm Herz’s results. They cued autobiographical memories with odors, words, and pictures, and found that picture-evoked memories were the most emotional and odor-evoked ones were the least emotional. Willander and Larsson write that “we did not find support for the notion that olfactory-evoked memory representations should be more emotional than memories evoked by other sensory cues.” It now looks as though the modified Proustian hypothesis—that odor memory, while not indelible, is more emotional—doesn’t hold up too well either.

By 2000, the third generation of Proust Boosters arrived and wasted little time before turning on their predecessors. The British psychologists Simon Chu and John Downes criticized previous studies for being insufficiently Proustian. (They pointed out, for example, that the memories examined in some experiments were not truly autobiographical.) Chu and Downes contrasted those failed attempts with their own research agenda, which, in their modest view, captured the true spirit of Proust. Their goal was nothing less than “translating the essence of Proust’s anecdotal literary descriptions into testable scientific hypotheses using the language of contemporary cognitive psychology.” (This is a patently ridiculous thing for scientists to do. How can a work of fiction, no matter how well written, become the truth standard for scientific research? What’s next? Will sex researchers lift hypotheses from Danielle Steel? Will Stephen King inspire psychiatric theories of fear?)

From out of left field came a quick challenge to Chu and Downes. J. Stephan Jellinek is a German psychologist who has worked as a perfumer and fragrance marketer. Not being an academic, he had the temerity to ask whether lab studies that relied on contrived and twice-prompted memories could capture the Proustian experience in any meaningful way. From a close reading of the madeleine episode, he extracts nine specific and testable characteristics of that experience. (Most have to do with the difficulty in identifying the emotion, tying it to an odor, and connecting the odor to an event in the past.) According to Jellinek, the experiments of Chu and Downes address only three of the key characteristics. Does measuring emotional response on a seven-point rating scale, he asks, truly capture the ecstatic experience described by Proust?

Determined to prove that odor memory is distinctive in some way, the latest Booster studies now claim that odors evoke older autobiographical memories than do words or pictures. This is an intriguing but ultimately trivial proposition. Whether this claim—the latest in a series of special pleadings—holds up is almost beside the point. Whether a lab experiment has captured the essence of Proust is certainly beside the point. The bigger question is why investigators decline to observe the natural history of smell for themselves, and prefer to base their research on a fictional episode. Three generations of psychologists have done so, and in each case they got lost in the woods. In the 1970s and 1980s the Proust Boosters grossly overestimated the permanence of odor memory. In the 1990s they overstated its emotional content. In the new century they overplayed how well lab studies could mimic an episode of fiction. Perhaps it’s time for them to set aside the soggy Twinkie.

M
EANWHILE, OUT IN
the real world, a lot of people think that odor memory is special. A Norwegian survey recently compared popular beliefs with scientific findings regarding memory. Among the general population, 36 percent believed—incorrectly—that smells were remembered better than sights or sounds. This may reflect the fact that there is something unsatisfying about the current scientific view. If odor memory is like other forms of memory, why does it feel so magical when a sniff triggers a twinge of remembrance? A lot of it has to do with surprise. You weren’t trying to remember the paints, oils, and solvents in Grandpa’s workshop—the memory popped up, unasked for, when you walked through a random odor plume. Even more surprising: you never made a deliberate effort to memorize those smells when you were seven years old. If you had, the recollection would be no surprise. In grade school you memorized the state capitals; to recall one years later doesn’t feel magical. Because odor memories accumulate automatically, outside of awareness, they cover their own tracks. We don’t remember remembering them. The sense of wonder that comes with the experience is, like all magic, an illusion based on misdirection. Like a nightclub mentalist, the mind presents us with a memory it picked from our pocket when we weren’t looking.

Henry Adams: The American Alternative

Psychology’s preoccupation with Proust has led to a narrow emphasis on involuntary memory and a neglect of the far more common features of the mental smellscape. These include how and why we willingly commit some smells to memory and not others; how and how well we retrieve them; and how fully we are able to reexperience them. These questions are a promising starting point for a fresh exploration of olfactory memory.

If Marcel Proust is the poster boy for private, involuntary odor memory, this new alternative view will need its own mascot. I propose the American author Henry Adams, who conveyed in one sentence the actual sensations of a childhood smellscape. In his autobiography, written in the third person, he gave us a litany of scents from a boyhood in the days before the Civil War. As we return with him and stand beside the barefoot kid of summer, we feel his love of the outdoors: not for him the scent of inky copybooks or Mama’s perfume, lavender sachets in the linen closet or bread in the oven.

Henry Adams gives us a small sample of a true olfactory memoir—it puts you behind another person’s nose in another time and place. In his honor, I call it Adams-style odor memory. To my way of thinking, Adams-style memory beats Proustian memory because it deals with smells that are deliberately sniffed and voluntarily recalled. These are not the buried land mines of Proustian memory; Henry Adams describes a smellscape that was familiar to his entire generation, and his memory of it is open to the public. Proustian memory inhabits a private, interior place, and is open by invitation only. For Proust, smell was a tool, a reflex hammer he used to probe his own mind. For the young Henry Adams, smell was the whole world; for the old Henry Adams, it was an open gateway to the past. Breathe deep: it’s summer, the sun is hot, and the tide is low.

Adams-style odor memory is popular with American writers. A fine example is found in the opening lines of
Lake Wobegon Days,
where Garrison Keillor conjures up the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota:

Along the ragged dirt path between the asphalt and the grass, a child slowly walks to Ralph’s Grocery, kicking an asphalt chunk ahead of him. It is a chunk that after four blocks he is now mesmerized by, to which he is completely dedicated. At Bunsen Motors, the sidewalk begins. A breeze off the lake brings a sweet air of mud and rotting wood, a slight fishy smell, and picks up the sweetness of old grease, a sharp whiff of gasoline, fresh tires, spring dust, and, from across the street, the faint essence of tuna hotdish at the Chatterbox Cafe.

You don’t have to be a Norwegian bachelor farmer to appreciate this. Anybody can inhale the scene and experience Lake Wobegon.

Adams-style memory has a big scope: it’s about extended episodes, not single events, entire smellscapes rather than isolated odors. Adams-style memory edits an entire season down to an aromatic highlight reel that can replayed at will. Dozens of Saturday afternoons with Grandpa at his workbench are distilled into a few key molecules.

By preserving familiar scenes, Henry Adams left us a time capsule of a lifestyle that has nearly vanished. For most of our history, most Americans lived and worked on farms; agriculture was our common smellscape. Haydn Pearson was born in 1901 and grew up on a small family farm in Hancock, New Hampshire. In a memoir, he recalls the ambience: “When I was a boy, one of my favorite spots was the livery stable. When I walked into Woodward’s Livery behind the Forest House Hotel, I was met by a pungent heady fragrance compounded of hay, leather, grain, harnesses, stained and splintered floor planks, and manure.” The interior of the livery office had its own character, “the fragrance of felt leggings, rubber arctics, sheep-lined coats, and the sawdust box for tobacco juice blended very pleasantly with the over-all aroma of the establishment.”

His family stored root vegetables and preserved foods in the farmhouse cellar, which acquired its own atmosphere: “a heavy damp pungent smell compounded of moist soil, potatoes, apples, carrots, turnips, salt pork, cold crackling brine, and the old floor boards. Probably there were some rotten potatoes and possibly a decayed cabbage or two, and if there is any farm-cellar fragrance equal to the combination of decayed potatoes and decomposed cabbages, I have yet to smell it.”

For Ben Logan, born in 1920 and raised on a small farm near the Kickapoo River in southwestern Wisconsin, haying time was aromatic: “A time like that comes back now sharp and real with all its smells of dust, horse sweat, man sweat, Lyle’s oozing pipe. There is the dry whirring of grasshoppers, steel wagon wheels ringing on the hard ground, the creak of the hay rope. There is the tepid smell of water as we drink from a bucket that has a taste of leftover lemonade. Above all is the sweet smell of curing hay.”