What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [94]
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.
HAVING 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