What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [95]
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.
MEANWHILE, 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