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Proustian Memory: how unconscious triggers can drive our lives


Dr. Helen Cassaday

At the time events are encoded into the memory, they may become associated with aspects of the environment in which they occurred. Remembering is then improved by perception of the appropriate environmental cues. This psychological phenomenon is a common occurrence for many people: for example, on returning to one's home town, on hearing a particular piece of music or smelling a familiar scent. In the famous episode of 'la madeleine', Proust, in The Remembrance of Things Past, shows how, when memories have faded and their objects have disappeared, smell and taste are potent cues for involuntary memory of associated experiences. Exact parallels of this kind are very difficult to demonstrate under controlled laboratory conditions, because both the environmental triggers and the associated autobiographical memories will be idiosyncratic. However, there have been many experimental demonstrations that stimuli in the learning environment (the environmental context) can prompt later recall. Generally, in associative learning, odour is a particularly potent stimulus. Conditioned responses are typically involuntary and can include both memories and biological reactions: in conditioned taste aversion, nausea and retching are reactions to the smell or taste of foods that have previously produced illness. Further biological reactions can also be triggered in this way, without any conscious awareness and in a wide range of biological systems. For example, through being paired with immunological reaction, environmental triggers can produce 'anticipation' with the same immunological response. Such biological memories may produce a mechanism for chronic non-specific illness, such as that suffered by veterans of the Gulf War.

Dr. Helen Cassaday read psychology at Oxford before taking a PhD in psychopharmacology at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London. After work as a researcher in the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, she took up a lectureship in the School of Psychology, University of Nottingham. Her research interests include associative effects in normal memory and the biological systems that can come under associative control. A collaborative project (with Eamonn Ferguson, also of the Nottingham School of Psychology) investigates the role that bio-associative mechanisms could play in non-specific illness. There has been considerable interest in their analysis of Gulf War illness in these terms.