Proust Effect

The Proust effect is the tendency for a sensory cue encountered in ordinary life, classically a smell or taste, to spontaneously trigger a vivid, involuntary memory of the past with no deliberate effort to recall it. It is named for the French novelist Marcel Proust, who in his novel In Search of Lost Time described his narrator tasting a madeleine cake dipped in tea and being flooded with unbidden childhood memories of eating the same treat with his aunt, memories that then cascaded into recollections of his childhood town. Proust was among the first to describe this kind of unwilled, sensory-triggered recollection in detail, though the psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus had already noted scientifically that mental states once present in consciousness can return to it with apparent spontaneity and without any act of the will. The Proust effect is now used as a general name for involuntary, cue-triggered memory of this kind, and is contrasted with voluntary memory, which requires a deliberate, conscious effort to recall the past.