Chem. Senses 29: 455-458,
2004
Chemical Senses Vol. 29 No. 5 © Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved
LETTER TO THE EDITOR |
Proust Remembered: Has Proust’s Account of Odor-cued Autobiographical Memory Recall Really been Investigated?
Stadtblick 7, 37603 Holzminden, Germany
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In the opening section of their paper entitled ‘Odour-evoked autobiographical memories: psychological investigation of Proustian phenomena’ (Chu and Downes, 2000a
) the authors refer to ‘a literary anecdote from Proust’ as an example of ‘folk wisdom concerning the power of odours to vividly remind one of particular past experiences’. Providing a one-paragraph excerpt from Proust’s three-page account of this ‘anecdote’, they define ‘what has become known as the Proust phenomenon’ as ‘the ability of odours spontaneously to cue autobiographical memories which are highly vivid, affectively toned and very old’. They then present a critical review of published research on odor memory in which they correctly point out that all studies but one (Aggleton and Waskett, 1999) were only partially relevant to the Proust phenomenon, either because they did not involve truly autobiographical memories, or because they did not provide a comparison between memories elicited by olfactory stimuli with memories