The Memory Meme that Refuses to Die

 

A reader’s letter to the Financial Times relates a charming story about her son, who as a two-year-old blurted out that a lady in a store smelled like his godmother. Lo and behold, both women wore L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain.

Thirty-one years later, he pulls the same stunt at a restaurant: he correctly identifies his godmother’s signature scent on a lady sitting at the next table.

The letter writer thought she was illustrating a point made in a previous edition of the paper, namely “wouldn’t it be a fine thing if there was a good smell that reminded people of you?” In fact, she did so quite effectively. We can also applaud her son for having a good nose, a keen awareness of scent, and a long memory.

But why did the FT have to spoil it all by slugging the letter “The power of scent is like a Proustian madeleine”? There is nothing Proustian about this anecdote. The first incident shows a toddler with a precocious awareness of smell. The second shows that as an adult he retains his smell identification ability, along with a good memory.

In neither instance was he transported to a full-blown evocation of an earlier time and place—whether by the instantaneous, effortless process described by many pre-Proustian writers, or by the slow, labored process described by Proust in Swann’s Way.

My guess is that some junior editorial assistant probably read French Literature at Cambridge and simply couldn’t resist justifying all that tuition money by working in a Proust reference.

Basta. In the interest of accuracy and history, isn't it time we begin to forget Proust’s madeleine?

Turgenev: The Scent Trails in “Smoke”

Turgenev, by Ilya Repin (1874)

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev did not make much use of olfactory imagery in his novels, at least judging by Fathers and Sons (1862) and Smoke (1867). For the most part, he set his scenes with spare yet effective visual references.

Yet there are a couple of notable exceptions in Smoke, which is the story of a man torn between his feelings for two very different women. One of them occurs when the protagonist Litvinov comes across a picnic party of young Russian officers and their ladies.

All these warriors were immaculately groomed, shaved and perfumed all over with a scent redolent of the nobility and the Guards, a mixture of the finest tobacco smoke and the most amazing patchouli.

There’s a rather hyper-particular smellscape from mid-nineteenth century Russia! And this one is even more so:

Irina [a femme fatale] was sitting on the sofa between Prince Koko and Madame Kh., once a famed beauty and pan-Russian bluestocking, who had long since mutated into a rotting toadstool, smelling of Lenten oil and stale poison.

In those days, the Eastern Orthodox Church proscribed olive oil during Lenten fasts; oil from other sources was allowed. The image of “stale poison”, on the other hand, is a product of Turgenev’s inventive genius.

There are a couple of other olfactory vignettes involving the intoxicating scent of a woman’s hair and neck. They serve their purpose well, but are less unique. A final instance involves an anonymously delivered bouquet of flowers, which figures later in the story.

A strong scent, very pleasant and familiar, caught his attention. He looked round and saw a large bouquet of fresh heliotropes in a glass of water on the window sill. In some surprise he bent down to the flowers, touched, them, sniffed them . . . It seems that something came back to him, something very distant, but what it was exactly he could not think.

Sacrebleu! Yet another example of “Proustian smell memory” that predates Proust by more than half a century. (In this case, it is Proustian in the actual sense of Marcel, namely an odor summoning up a vague, ungraspable feeling where an actual memory ought to be).

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev
Smoke (1867)

Rate of Decay: The Case of Jonah Lehrer’s Twitter Account

Anyone active on Twitter experiences follower churn—the constant arrival of new followers and departure of existing ones. Some arrivals are follow-whores who will leave in short order if you fail to follow them back. Some are fake accounts attempting to build a legit patina. (Fake accounts are easy to spot and I delight in kicking them off my feed.) Then there are real-life porn actors and jihadists seeking to expand their reach. (Blocked and blocked.) Others follow you based on the odd single tweet and depart when they find your regular material is not to their taste. (de gustibus).

In general, one must tweet frequently to gain new followers. If you have a truly loyal set of followers they may stick around even if you tweet rarely.

But what happens at the limit, when an account ceases to tweet at all? In the absence of new material it is unlikely to attract new followers. Existing followers may eventually unfollow, or close their accounts, or be banned by Twitter. Thus we can expect an inactive account to shed followers gradually. But at what rate?

I have harvested data on a weekly basis from several Twitter accounts. One is that of Jonah Lehrer who enjoyed a brief vogue as a literary explainer of neuroscience. (I found him to be a superficial thinker and a lazy scholar; see the Proust chapter in What the Nose Knows.) After it became clear that Lehrer had recycled his own material and plagiarized the work of others he withdrew from the science journo-biz and, among other things, ceased tweeting.

The last regular tweet on @jonahlehrer was dated June 17, 2012. On February 13, 2013 he posted a link to the text of a speech he gave to the Knight Foundation in which he apologized for his behavior (and for which he was paid $20,000). After that, nada.

So how did Lehrer’s Twitter followers react after he went silent? Well, here’s the answer, based on weekly tallies from October 14, 2012 through December 31, 2016.

Over that period Lehrer lost 6,258 followers. Their number declined to 40,620 from 46,878. The steady decline was interrupted by three increases: a spike of 2,005 followers the week of October 28, 2012; a blip of 369 followers around May 2013, and another spike of 1,998 in the week of August 24, 2013. (Cynical readers might note that Twitter followers can be bought by the thousand online. Whether something like that happened here, I cannot say. The spikes remain a mystery.)

Aside from the anomalous spikes, the decline in followers shows a remarkably steady linear trend. I analyzed the 173 weeks following the second spike, during which the follower count dropped to 40,620 from 47,800 for a loss of 7,180. Over that interval, Lehrer lost on average -0.0935% of his followers each week. Based on this rate of decay, the half-life of his following is 741 weeks or about 14 years. In other words, he should be down to 20,000 followers in 2031. We can expect him to dip under 100 followers in the year 2140.

That’s one long, shallow glide path.

Is Lehrer’s case typical? Who knows. Maybe his followers are fanatically devoted and waiting, year after year, for him to return to Twitter. Or maybe they never noticed that he left in the first place. Having once clicked “follow” they remain fixed to his account like so many barnacles on the bottom of a boat.

Henry Adams and The Non-Blonde

Gaia Fishler blogs indefatigably about fragrance and cosmetics as The Non-Blonde. Yesterday, in a change of pace, she wrote about her earliest scent memories. The smells themselves are not remarkable: her mother’s brand of soap; a Moroccan neighbor’s cooking; a summer weekend at the beach. But the web of associations she spins around them gives them unique vividness, detail and emotional tone. She describes them in a way that lets the rest of us imagine them, even when Gaia the pre-schooler relates her idiosyncratic impression of the inside of a washing machine as “white and ominous”.

Note that Fishler’s olfactory memories as not Proustian. They are not spontaneously evoked by a scent in the air (or the tedious madeleine dipped in tea). Rather, they are the product of deliberate recall. Also, they do not require a prolonged inner struggle to place them in time and space. Instead, Fishler tells us about them in an easy, compelling way that, to my mind, qualifies as olfactory memoir.

In What the Nose Knows, I contrasted Proust’s over-praised madeleine passage with a more open and democratic type of olfactory memoir:

Henry Adams gave 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 Adamsonian memory. To my way of thinking, Adamsonian memory beats Proustian memory because it deals with smells that are deliberately sniffed and voluntarily recalled. These are not the buried landmines 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.

Gaia Fishler has given us a lovely Adamsonian glimpse into her early life. Brava!

One Hundred Years of the Soggy Madeleine

V.L. Hendrickson in the WSJ reminds us that it was 100 years ago this month that Proust published the first volume of In Search of Lost Time.

If you start reading it now, you might finish all seven volumes by the time the sesquicentennial rolls around.

Timely reminder from the FN Reader Services Dept.: Proust was not a neuroscientist nor was he the first (by a long shot) to link smell and memory, despite what acknowledged plagiarist and disgraced “journalist” Jonah Lehrer maintained.

I see that the Knight Foundation just paid Lehrer $20,000 to give a talk on plagiarism to their media/journalism conference. Shameful behavior on their part. If they were intent on giving him a platform for a mea culpa come-back speech, airfare and a hotel room would have been a better match for his sackcloth and ashes.

I smell a new book from Lehrer. Something in the neuroscience cum confessional memoir genre, like “My Brain Made Me Do It: A Writer’s Quest to Conquer His Compulsions.”

Hot tip from the FN Self-Promotion Dept.: I will happily deliver a fascinating, well-researched speech on the American, English, and French sources that Proust drew on for the madeleine episode. And I’ll do it for a fraction of what the Knight Foundation paid Lehrer.

Call me.

FN Review: The Book of Lost Fragrances

When I was offered an advance reading copy of M.J. Rose’s new novel, The Book of Lost Fragrances, I hesitated. It wasn’t because, as Ms. Rose’s publicist pointed out, Publishers Weekly described it as a “deliciously sensual novel of paranormal suspense.” Here at FirstNerve we have no problem reviewing novels loaded with paranormal suspense. And the deliciously sensual is always welcome. (Mmmm . . . tasty!)

No, the hesitation was due to the prospect that The Book of LF would, by its mere physical presence on the shelf, cause a small but steady decline in testosterone levels. And you know how that goes—you review a romance novel and a few days later a small inner voice is saying, “Try putting a dollop of crème fraîche into that pesto,” and pretty soon the chardonnay budget is through the roof and you’re wondering if it’s time to start using a moisturizing facial scrub.

But rather than shrink from FN’s commitment to all things olfactory, I bravely accepted the offer and my copy of The B of LF arrived last week.

It had great looking cover art. Inside, a page listed the author’s previous novels including Lip Service, In Fidelity, and Lying in Bed. [Awesome titleage!—Ed.] Then came an epigraph from Marcel Proust, an unmistakable signal that the story to follow would be highly enriched with canards about odor memory. Indeed it is. M.J. Rose is a Proust Booster of epic proportions; an estrogen-fueled fabulist who takes odor-based recall to a whole new level.

The BOLF is ostensibly the story of Jac L’Etoile, a semiologist who has her own TV show called Mythfinders. Soon enough, however, we’re following multiple story lines set in ancient Egypt, Revolutionary-era France, and present-day China. The plot hinges on Cleopatra’s perfumer, who is charged with making a memory-evoking fragrance powerful enough to reveal the smeller’s previous lives. The perfumer and his lover take to their double-wide sarcophagus, each holding a jar of the scent, so that they may use it to find each other in subsequent incarnations. Their souls—and his vision-inducing scent—make numerous reappearances in the L’Etoile family, Parisian perfumers who have been running a successful business since before the Revolution.

Also in the cast of characters are the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, who want the fragrance to help them identify the next D.L., along with the Communist Chinese and their hired thugs who want to stop them. Plus the Jungian analyst from a Swiss nuthouse who wants the fragrance so he can settle some of his own Oedipal issues. Plus Jac’s bisexual brother Robbie, her Alzheimer-stricken father, and her ex-boyfriend Griffen North, now a studly archaeologist.

Whew!

M.J. Rose stocks her story with enough characters to fill a Hollywood tour bus: dramatis personae-wise she’s the Charles Dickens of romance novels sensual novels of paranormal suspense. When Jac, under the hallucinogenic influence of the ancient Egyptian scent, has flashbacks to her previous lives, it gets a little complicated. With all the reincarnations, the effect is like flipping between three episodes of Law & Order SVU playing on different cable channels—while eating an entire jumbo tub of buttered popcorn. The overall effect, for me, was filling yet unsatisfying.

For other readers this might be a feature, not a bug. The reincarnation bit lets you thrill repeatedly to the same emotions with the same (?) characters in different epochs and places. It’s the multiple re-entry vehicle of romance novels sensual novels of paranormal suspense. More bang for the buck. Except that there’s not really that much bang in the book. TBOLF observes a certain literary decorum. Despite all the yearning and passion, I was startled when the word “cock” made its single appearance.

The genre elements of TBOLF let the reader have her cake and eat it too. You can have guilt-free sex with a married ex-boyfriend because you were hot for him in a previous life. You can be a modern American woman but also be suavely French. You can have no perfumery training whatsoever yet have a better nose than your father and brother—both professional perfumers.

Nifty.

Rose writes quite convincingly about scents and about the experience of smelling. I give her credit for sustaining an entire story based on smell—as a plot element, as a theme, and as narrative description. In this she does better than Tom Robbins. While she takes the metaphysical claptrap of Jitterbug Perfume seriously she spins it into a passable chick-lit potboiler.

Hey, who wants some more chardonnay? You really should try the pesto.

Adjusting the Proust Goggles

[Steampunk eyewear by Kyle Miller.]

FN reader and fledgling science blogger Cellularscale brought this one to my attention a few days ago. It’s a new paper by a Dutch research team at Utrecht University. Their topic is the Proustian Hypothesis, which holds that odors are more effective triggers of emotional memories than cues in other sense modalities. This frequently invoked notion, along with the crediting of it to the French novelist, is one that I beat to a bloody pulp in a chapter of What the Nose Knows called “Proust’s Soggy Madeleine.”

So when Cellularscale pointed me to “Proust revisited: Odours as triggers of aversive memories,” I downloaded a copy and opened it with interest. Would this group of psychologists be Proust Boosters or Proust Busters?

They begin by noting that previous studies have led to conflicting results regarding olfactory exceptionalism. They also point to a methodological problem: most studies of sensory-cued memories fail to “control for individual differences between memories in terms of content, affective value, and time past since encoding.” In the usual experimental design, you are offered a smell/picture/sound and asked to recall a memory associated with it. So a smoky scent might remind one person of good times at the smokehouse on grandpa’s farm, and another of a traumatic house fire, leading to big-time variability and statistical noise.

One way to reduce this variability is to create a uniform memory in the lab. The Utrecht team did this by having volunteers watch a 12-minute film involving traffic accidents, surgery, and people being crushed by a stampeding elephant. (When it comes to aversive stimuli, psychologists can really deliver the goods!)

The film was accompanied by a scent in the test room, along with background lighting and a soundtrack. All three sensory cues were elaborately pilot tested beforehand to insure that they were equally pleasant, intense and arousing. (The odor was IFF’s Cassifix, dissolved in isopropyl myristate).

Volunteers watched the film and rated it on emotionality, vividness, pleasantness, and arousal. A week later, they came back to the lab expecting to watch another film. Instead, they were asked to write down their memory of the earlier film, and rate the memory on the same dimensions (along with “level of detail” and “evocativeness.”). While doing this they were randomly exposed to one of the three background stimuli from the earlier session: either olfactory, auditory, or visual.

The film-memory ratings were compared across the three groups. Odor-cued memories were less pleasant, more arousing and experienced as more detailed than memories evoked by the music cues. However,

Memories evoked by a visual trigger did not differ significantly from memories evoked by an odour or by music.

While odors trumped tunes, they “were not more evocative or emotive than visual triggers.”

So how best to view these results? It depends on whether or not you’re wearing Proust goggles. If you are, then you focus on the hypothesis-saving effectiveness of smell over sound. If not, you see this as more evidence that smell doesn’t live up to its reputation as a super-cue for memory.

The study discussed here is “Proust revisited: Odours as triggers of aversive memories,” by Marieke B.J. Toffolo, Monique A.M. Smeets, and Marcel A. van den Hout, published in Cognition and Emotion, 26:83-92, 2012.

Which Came First: The Preference or the Choice?

For my part in the recent Mystery of Musk competition I sniffed ten perfumes fresh and at drydown, on both blotter and skin—a rather sustained bout of evaluation that left me thinking about the psychology of sensory judgment. Afterwards, I happened across an new study by Swiss psychologist Géraldine Coppin and her colleagues that speaks to the topic. It’s an olfactory twist on a common experience: after struggling to choose between similar items—neckties, music albums, scenic travel routes—we come to believe that we did, after all, make the correct choice.

But did we really? Or did we adjust our impressions after the fact, in order to justify our choice? A ton of experimental evidence suggests that after choosing between two similar items, a person will later rate the chosen one more positively than before, and the rejected item as less desirable. Psychologists dub this “choice-induced preference modulation”. It’s an echo of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: the very act of selecting changes the evaluation.

Psychologists like to explain this phenomenon using Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance. The idea is that we get a mental headache of sorts after choosing Mary Kate, because we are aware that Ashley also has many positive traits while Mary Kate has some negative ones. It is hard to reconcile this knowledge with the belief we made the correct choice. To resolve the metaphysical headache, we adjust our view of Ashley downward by stressing her negatives and lowering her positives; we also enhance the favorable features of Mary Kate and dial down her negative attributes.

(Festinger’s much-studied theory had a soft spot at its core: how do we know that any two beliefs are cognitively dissonant? For many years, the joke in psychology departments was “ask Leon”; hardly a solid basis for a theory of mind.)

There remains a open empirical question: how does the post-choice adjustment in perception come about? Is it a deliberate, conscious process (as cognitive-dissonance fans believe), or do we change our evaluations implicitly and unconsciously? There’s a lot of evidence for the latter, which brings us to Coppin’s study.

Working with a couple of researchers from the Swiss fragrance house Firmenich, her team assembled a dozen relatively unfamiliar smells of moderate intensity and pleasantness, e.g., fig flower, tutti-frutti, vetyver and yogurt. Volunteers were asked to rate the smells for intensity and pleasantness. Next, they were given pairs of odors and asked to choose the one they preferred. In some cases the choice was hard: the two odors were closely matched based on the volunteer’s pleasantness ratings. Other times the choice was easy: the odors were ones rated as very dissimilar.

Ten minutes after selecting the preferred odors, the volunteer smelled all dozen odors again, along with six new ones, and rated them again for intensity and pleasantness. He was also asked whether he had smelled the odor previously and, if so, whether it was one he had chosen or rejected.

Among odors presented as similarly-pleasant, hard-to-choose pairs, the chosen odors were later rated more pleasant, and the rejected odors less pleasant, compared to the initial evaluation. This confirms for the sense of smell that the act of choosing modulates subsequent perceptual judgments. This happened whether or not the volunteer remembered choosing. This implies that preference modulation for scents can occur without conscious awareness.

When it comes to smell, it looks like we can safely disregard Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory. It also looks like we can stick another pin in our patented FirstNerve Marcel Proust voodoo doll: here’s another way in which odor memory—more precisely, memory for odor judgments—is modified by experience, and not preserved forever in amber as the Proust Boosters would have it.

Coppin’s results have some impact on the psychology of fragrance choice. The perceptual ambiguity of tough-to-choose sniff sessions are automatically modulated once we make a selection, and our new judgments come to support the choice we made. Think of it as the clarifying effect of olfactory decision making. It also may be the mechanism behind another familiar experience: the fact that a newly purchased fragrance “grows on you.”

More Psychologists Wearing Proust Goggles

It’s a tradition in some scientific journals to publish a commentary piece that highlights a newsworthy article in the current issue. One journal that does this is the weekly Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. The November 10 issue contained a paper by a team of Swiss neuroscientists about emotional memory and genetic variation in the α2b-adrenergic receptor. People with a particular variant form of this neurotransmitter receptor have enhanced emotional memory. The Swiss paper uses fMRI imaging to show that such people also have increased activity in the amygdala—an emotional processing area of the brain—when viewing pictures with negative emotional content.

A cool result: it could have bearing on individual susceptibility to flashbacks of emotional memory or to PTSD.

PNAS invited two psychologists from a University of Toronto research center to put the new results in context. Rebecca Todd and Adam Anderson wrote a commentary called “The neurogenetics of remembering emotions past.”

The Proustian allusion in the title caught my eye. No sooner had I downloaded the paper than the alarm on the First Nerve Bogosity Meter began screaming like an angry fishmonger in Marseille.

Here’s how the paper opens:

Even if you have not waded through all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, you are probably familiar with its most famous scene where the narrator bites into a little cake called a madeleine, dipped in tea, and experiences a wash of vivid emotional memories. This literary moment has captured popular imagination (madeleines are now sold by Starbucks) because it so effectively captures the powerful and involuntary nature of emotional memory.

Oh, boy. Where to begin? Drs. Todd and Anderson completely misrepresent the madeleine scene. Proust’s narrator did not experience “a wash of vivid emotional memories” when slurping his tea-soaked Twinkie; he experienced a vague, nonspecific sense of familiarity, tried repeatedly to re-evoke it, and strained to recall the original memory. What Todd and Anderson call a “literary moment” drags on for page after page.

All of us are familiar with the sudden transports of emotional memory, especially when touched off by a stray smell. Other writers before and after Proust have captured this phenomenon more succinctly and poetically (see here and What the Nose Knows for examples). Proust’s madeleine episode is emphatically not a description of these vivid and effortlessly recalled flashes of memory. Their use of the oxymoronic phrase “Proustian vividness” suggests that that Todd and Anderson have not waded through even the first fifty pages of Swann’s Way.

This could all be forgiven if it were only an embarrassingly sophomoric attempt at literary garnish for a highly technical paper. Unfortunately, having donned their patented Proust Goggles, Todd and Anderson step deeper into the doodoo. They cite Proust as if he were presenting a biomedical hypothesis; by the end of the paper this is how they’re talking about him:

Proust conjectured that emotional memories are more akin to a bodily reflex than to the higher-level meaning-making systems that drive voluntary memory. The finding that genetic polymorphisms in adrenoceptors related to regulating blood pressure are further associated with individual differences in amygdala activation and emotion-enhanced memory is consistent with Proust’s view.

For Pete’s sake! It’s one thing to garble your literary allusions. It’s another to adopt a nearly unreadable proto-modern novelist as your scientific idol. I just don’t get it. What drives psychologists to prostrate themselves at the altar of Professor Proust?

In the psychology of smell memory, the Proust Boosters have come and gone. Despite scads of scientific papers with titles like “Proust nose best”, we now know that odor memory operates like all other forms of memory: it decays with time and can be altered by subsequent experience. Let’s hope that researchers working on adrenergic receptors and brain processing of emotion don’t make us suffer through more cutesy titles and mangled lit-crit.

Enleverez les lunettes de Proust!

[More Proust Goggles here.]

A Ghostly Scent from Long Ago

It’s October, the days are growing shorter, the moon is full, and Halloween is not far off. What better time for a sentimentally fragrant ghost story?

One hundred and thirty-eight years ago this month, Bret Harte published a poem called “A Newport Romance” in The Atlantic Monthly. Harte, who made his bones with “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and other stories set in the California Gold Rush, was thirty-five years old at the time. He had just signed a record-setting $10,000 a year deal with the magazine to publish one story a month, and would soon give up his professorship at the University of California to move back East.

Harte’s poem is told by a fellow who lives in a haunted house by the seaside in Newport, Rhode Island. The spirit that lingers there is that of a previous owner, an elderly spinster who died waiting for her lover to return. 

And ever since then, when the clock strikes two,
She walks unbidden from room to room,
And the air is filled that she passes through
With a subtle, sad perfume.

The delicate odor of mignonette,
The ghost of a dead-and-gone bouquet,
Is all that tells of her story; yet
Could she think of a sweeter way?

Who is this lady? Is the setting of an old house in Newport just an arbitrary poetic fancy? Hardly. 

One hundred years earlier—in the summer of 1781—the Comte de Rochambeau and six thousand French soldiers arrived to aid the American Revolution. Rochambeau’s men camped in the fields of Newport and his officers were billeted in private homes in town, where they were well-received and entertained by the local Yankees. Rochambeau and his men left town in July, 1781 to join forces with George Washington and begin the siege of Yorktown. By October, Rochambeau and his countryman the Marquis de Lafayette had helped the Continental Army defeat Lord Cornwallis and the British. So Harte’s poetic story lines up nicely with historical fact. His love-struck Quaker lady of Newport met and fell in love with a French soldier under the command of Rochambeau.

But why the ghostly scent? Her Frenchman gave her scented bouquets which she kept as she waited for his return.

But she kept the posies of mignonette
That he gave; and ever as their bloom failed
And faded (though with her tears still wet)
Her youth with their own exhaled.

She would wait in vain until the end of her life—and even after, if the ghost story is to be believed. The narrator, evidently living alone in “this sad old house,” waits for the clock to strike two then sniffs expectantly:

Was it the trick of a sense o’erwrought
With outward watching and inward fret?
But I swear that the air just now was fraught
With the odor of mignonette!

He opens a window and gazes out at the ocean and at a nearby gas-lit house where a happy dance party is in progress—a scene that painfully contrasts with the loneliness of his sad old house. He sniffs again and comes to an exquisite olfactory insight:

And no odor of mignonette there is,
But the breath of morn on the dewy lawn;
And mayhap from causes as slight as this
The quaint old legend is born.

There you have it—the psychology of odor expectation in rhyming verse.

But wait, there’s more! Nearly a half century before Marcel Proust publishes his over-praised, madeleine-cued olfactory memories, Harte gives us the real deal:

But the soul of that subtle, sad perfume,
As the spiced embalmings, they say, outlast
The mummy laid in his rocky tomb,
Awakens my buried past.

And I think of the passion that shook my youth,
Of its aimless loves and its idle pains,
And am thankful now for the certain truth
That only the sweet remains.

Here Harte strikes a melancholy note so often found in poems and stories about remembered smells. Faded scent and faded memory are both elusive; we yearn to experience them vividly in the here-and-now, and are saddened by our inability to conjure the past. At the same time, their recollection brings us some small measure of happiness, selectively filtered by time.

Another Clown Prince of Perfumery?

Commenter “Eliza” recently added this note to my post about Roja Dove, the buffoonish ‘Professeur de Parfums.’ I found it interesting enough to reprint here in full:

I’m so glad you post pieces like this one. I studied perfumery in Grasse and am constantly amazed at the amount of baloney out there. 

I’ve often wondered where Roja Dove received his professorship . . . 

There’s a ‘perfumer’ in Portland who writes that he is ‘recognized as one of 26 by the Council of Six. To qualify as a Nose, the prospective candidate must be able to recant all of the elements that comprises the essential elements within a fragrance before the sprayed droplets reach the floor.’

I LOVE that last bit. (Image in my mind of shrieking out “Hexyl cinnamic aldehyde, Hedione, Benzyl Salicylate!” as they ‘fall’ to the floor.) I double-checked with Max Gavarry just to make sure this wasn’t a top secret society I’d missed out on and he snorted in response. 

In a nutshell, it seems that because a lot of people haven’t had the opportunity to learn about smell and at the same time are fed a huge amount of misinformation, ‘Noses’ like these can say what they like.

What an excellent comment—a mini-essay, really!

On the matter of baloney and misinformation, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve given talks all over the country and it astounds me that, thanks to Chandler Burr’s lick-job of Luca Turin, people think the vibration theory of olfaction is taken seriously by scientists. (It’s not. Most scientists find it as snort-worthy as the name-it-before-it-hits-the-floor test of the Portland Nose.)

It was in part to counter the sheer volume of olfactory nonsense that I wrote my book. At times I felt I was beating the dead horse of Proustian odor memory into a pulp. But every time I give a lecture someone in the audience brings up the old canard, so I get out the horsewhip and have at it again.

Eliza’s reference to the Nose of Portland got my attention. Here is a character as potentially ridiculous as Roja Dove. The Oregonian’s name is Chris Tsefalas and he’s the elderly proprietor of a quirky but high-end perfume shop run out of his oddly-appointed home. He’s been in business over twenty years, along with his wife. By all accounts—and there are a lot of accounts available on the web—he’s charming, knowledgeable, and quite the raconteur (that’s French for “elegant bullshitter”). He’s made a business filling a niche in the ecosystem of West Coast retail fragrance, and for that he deserves applause.

As to his being anointed a “Nose” by the quasi-mystical “Council of Six”: well, let an old fellow have his delusions—or let a sly old fox bamboozle the newbies. The only web reference I can find to the Council of Six has something to do with World of Warcraft. (Hey, can any of you teen gamers out there stop reading the fart posts long enough to help us out?)

Mr. Tsefalas’s loopy claim of being a Nose (along with his tutelage by the mysterious Dr. Walter Lauchner of Cologne) is even more unnecessary than it is silly. The proprietor of a parfumerie needn’t be a Nose. The owner should be a person of taste and a judge of character—how else match fragrance and customer reliably enough to stay in business?

Finally, can we dispense with the term “nose”? If you apply that term to any of the real perfumers I know, odds are your nose will soon be meeting their fist.

Proust With an Anal Probe: The Smells of an Alien Abduction

Marcel Proust’s mistaken ideas about smell memory have soaked deeply into popular culture—so deep they are used to support the authenticity of alien abduction stories.

Whitley Strieber’s Communion: A true story (1987) is the narrative of his abduction by aliens in a UFO, followed by his realization under hypnosis that such visitations had been occurring throughout his life. While Strieber remained coy about whether his “visitors” were, in fact, extraterrestrials, most readers made the leap and drove the book to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list (in nonfiction!). Two years later it became a movie with Strieber played by Christopher Walken.

The details of Strieber’s story emerged only under hypnosis. According to the “recovered memories” crowd and the Freudians who aid and abet their nonsense, memories that have to be teased out through hypnosis are more accurate and trustworthy because they have been sealed away, untouched, behind a wall of “psychological repression.” Scientists, in contrast, see hypnosis as an invitation to psychological suggestion: the hypnotist can cue, and the subject can “recover,” whatever type of memory they hope to find.

In his novel In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust portrayed sensory memory as uniquely true because, unlike other forms of memory, it doesn’t change with time. To Proust, smell memory is immutable and inherently trustworthy. Smell-evoked memories are unimpeachable links to past events. Whitley Strieber takes the Proustian ball and runs with it: he repeatedly invokes smells as evidence that his abduction was real.

Strieber’s “abduction” took place on December 26, 1985. When the aliens proposed to insert a needle into his brain he objected, fearing brain damage.

One of them, I think it was the one I had identified earlier as the woman [alien], said, ‘What can we do to help you stop screaming?’ [. . .] My reply was unexpected. I heard myself say, ‘You could let me smell you.’ I was embarrassed; this is not a normal request, and it bothered me. But it made a great deal of sense, as I have afterward realized.

The one to my right replied, ‘Oh, OK, I can do that,’ in a similar voice, speaking very rapidly, and held his hand against my face, cradling my head with his other hand. The odor was distinct, and gave me exactly what I needed, an anchor in reality. It remained the most convincing aspect of the whole memory, because that odor was completely indistinguishable from a real one. It did not seem in any way a dream experience or a hallucination. I remembered it as an actual smell.

So what does an alien visitor smell like?

There was a slight scent of cardboard to it, as if the sleeve of the coverall that was partly pressed against my face were made of some substance like paper. The hand itself had a faint but distinctly organic sourness in its odor. It was not a human smell, but it was unmistakably the smell of something alive. There was a subtle overtone that seemed a little like cinnamon.

The next thing I knew, there was a bang and a flash, and I realized that they have performed the proposed operation on my head.

In the weeks that follow, Strieber is distressed about the incident and begins to doubt his own sanity.

Then, quite suddenly once afternoon, I recalled the smell. Their smell. It came back to me as clearly as if I had inhaled it not a moment before. More than anything except discovering that I was not alone with my experience, that totally real memory saved me from going stark raving mad.

Thank heaven for the solid anchor of Proustian smell memory!

Three months later, Strieber recalls his abduction under hypnosis:

I’m sitting on a bench in a little room. [Sniffs.] And it smells funny. Smells somethin’ like cheese in here. Smells kind of nasty, to tell you the truth. It’s not clean in here.

Cheese? What cheese? Here’s all he said about smell in his original description: “I seem to remember that the room was stuffy and the air quite dry . . .” So this olfactory detail—that the UFO’s reception room smelled like cheese—is an entirely new feature brought up under hypnosis. Strieber has just revised his “totally real” smell memory. Later, in the course of reflecting on the hypnosis session, he revises it even further:

The space I entered smelled like warm Cheddar cheese with a hint of sulfur. This sulfur odor has been reported by others.

So “stuffy” becomes “cheese” which becomes “warm Cheddar cheese with a hint of sulfur.” In other words, he subtly re-tunes his story to agree with other published accounts of alien abduction.

Meanwhile, Strieber introduces another Proustian revelation: the alien’s clothing “opened the door to the past. And it did this via my sense of smell.” How? Back in his apartment after the abduction, he senses the visitors again:

I felt their presence. It was palpable. Most upsetting, I could smell them. I could smell a distinct odor as if of smoldering cardboard, and it was familiar from the past. [...] Until now, though, I had not understood its significance.

The significance is that 12 or 13 years earlier he smelled smoldering cardboard one night and saw a small figure with a red light in its hand dashing through the house. He didn’t realize it at the time but this was his first brush with aliens.

Once again, Strieber edits his supposedly unshakable Proustian smell memory. The smell of the visitor’s coverall—originally a “slight scent of cardboard”—has now become “a distinct odor as if of smoldering cardboard.” (Smoldering? Were the alien’s clothes on fire?)

The effect is to buttress his newly revealed past of lifelong encounters with aliens. Or, as he puts it,

Odor is an excellent trigger of memory, and the odor of smoldering seemed to unlock a lot of doors.

Indeed. How convenient for Whitley Strieber that smell memory—a la Proust—is always true, even as he shades the recollections of it to suit his purpose.

Odor Memory Before Proust: Dr. Thomas and the Bohemian Fruit Boat

Marcel Proust is the official poster boy for odor-evoked memory. As I’ve pointed out before, this is wrong on several levels. First of all, the madeleine episode in Swann’s Way doesn’t describe the magical experience most of us associate with smell memory, namely a vivid, detailed, and instantaneous recollection of the past. Instead, Proust’s narrator struggles to capture a vague emotion and takes several minutes to locate it in time and place.

Secondly, Proust was not the first writer to describe the phenomenon of odor-evoked memory. It was, as I showed in my book, a common theme in American (and French) literature for many decades before the publication of Swann’s Way.

Finally, despite Jonah Lehrer’s fanciful spin, Proust was not a neuroscientist. The notion that he uncovered “an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering” is lot of baloney. Here’s another reason why: a scientific paper published in 1896—thirteen years before Proust’s novel appeared.

The paper appeared in German in the Journal for the Psychology and Physiology of the Sense Organs. The author was Dr. Fr. Thomas of Ohrdruf, Germany. From what I can gather, Thomas was a priest with a doctorate in natural science—his specialty was the entomology of mite galls.

In his paper—“A further example of association through a smell sensation as a subconscious intermediary”—Thomas gives a detailed, autobiographical account of an odor-evoked memory. Here’s the key part (with paragraph breaks added):

In the spring of 1861 I was a student in Berlin. My daily route to the University took me along Artilleriestrasse over the Eberts Bridge. One day in the late fall of 1861, as I crossed the bridge fully immersed in thought, there suddenly appeared before me the Hüttenthal Valley near Königstein in the mountains of Saxony, where I had lived for a long time many years earlier, so lifelike in front of my eyes, that I could not understand how the direction of my thoughts could have been changed all at once.

I was in a hurry to be on time for a lecture and so immediately picked up again the broken thread of my earlier thoughts. The next day at the same hour—I had not thought again about this incident since then—the same thing happened! I stopped cold, as the return to this exact same place was simply too remarkable. I took a few steps backward, slowly and concentrating my attention, when the source became clear to me:

Near the bridge was berthed a Bohemian fruit boat, whose owner had his wares for sale in tubs hung on the railing of the bridge, while the boat itself served as a floating supply cellar and living space for its occupant. The Bohemian had brought brown coal with him as cheap heating fuel. The smell of the smoke from this coal, that had also been commonly used in Hüttenthal, had called up/awakened the memory picture to me.

In Gotha and Jena, where I had also lived before 1861, this heating material was not used. To me it was the same smoke smell that had been new to me in the Saxony mountains, and so become an integral part of the total picture of that new world for me, and it was able three years later to call forth this picture again.

Although it appeared in a scientific journal, this account is quite literary and quite “Proustian”: a narrator is initially baffled by the sudden appearance of a forgotten scene; with an effort he eventually recognizes that his memory was triggered by a smell. Unlike Proust, Dr. Fr. Thomas really was a neuroscientist—and not a bad memoirist either. His paper is another reason to take Proust off the pedestal and acknowledge that science nailed odor memory without the help of any novelist.

[Source: Dr. Fr. Thomas, Ein weiteres Beispiel von Assoziation durch eine Geruchsempfindung als unbewuβtes Mittleglied. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 1896:12:60-61. My thanks to Ernest Sanders for the translation.]

Marcel Proust Gets Up My Nose

It's not like I have a personal issue with Marcel Proust--he's been dead for almost eighty-six years.  His mega-novel In Search of Lost Time may well deserve its lofty reputation, though I admit it puts me to sleep.  No, what's so wrong and so irritating is that Proust has become the undeserving poster-boy of olfactory memory.

The latest example hit the web this morning:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 17, 2008) — When French memoirist
Marcel Proust dipped a pastry into his tea, the distinctive
scent it produced suddenly opened the flood gates of his
memory.

In a series of experiments with sleeping mice, researchers
at the Duke University Medical Center . . .

First off, let's stipulate that the Duke team did a fine experiment and they are entitled to publicize it.  My beef isn't with the sleeping mice; it's with Proust's pastry and the flood gates.  

It's a complete misrepresentation of what Proust actually wrote.  Here's why.

For most of us, the magic of smell memory is that it transports us instantly to a vividly detailed, often emotionally charged scene from the past.  It's a remarkable experience.

But when the narrator of Swann's Way (a stand-in for Proust) dunks a madeleine in a cup of tea the aroma produces a vague and perplexing emotion.  He struggles for several minutes to pinpoint it.  He agonizes.  He re-dunks. This goes on for five tedious pages until the young Marcel finally recalls having had tea and madeleines as a kid.

Whatever it was Proust described, it was not the opening of flood gates, the flicking of a switch, or the sudden flash of detailed sense-memory.

On top of this, people frequently credit Proust with being the first to describe odor-evoked memory.  As I show in my book, this is a complete crock.  The vividness of smell memory was a common theme well before Proust's time.  It was written about decades earlier by such great American authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

So credit where credit is due.  It's time to let the bad Proust meme fade from memory.