Throughout my undergraduate experience as a cognitive science student, a number of influential experiences have helped shape my interest in cognitive phenomena. While many experiences in my Introduction to Cognitive Science course were influential, I especially found the lecture on French novelist Marcel Proust fascinating. During this lecture, we were given an excerpt from Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Volume I that highlighted the remarkable ability of external cues in triggering emotions and memories.
By serving as an example of self-discovery through narrative, Proust writes about quite a few central themes that define the field of cognitive science prior to its establishment as a discipline, describing and connecting elements of mental processing such as sensation and perception, the fluidity of cognitive states, mental spaces and representations, recursive thinking, visual memory and its association with taste and smell, memory and its relation to emotion, and the generation of images as symbols for understanding the world. Proust begins in this excerpt by illustrating how the senses, specifically smell and taste, can alter the mood. Initially feeling dispirited and depressed, as soon as he tasted a madeleine cookie soaked in lime blossom tea, "a shudder ran through [him] and [he] stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to [him]. An exquisite pleasure had invaded [his] senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin" (Proust, para. 1).
When he decides to further examine the origins of his altered state, after experiencing difficulty reaching these underlying memories that were tied to this powerful, subjective, pleasure-filled experience, he finally discovers their association with the small taste of madeleine dipped in tea that his aunt Léonie would give him after he visited her room and wished her a good morning. In considering why simply seeing a madeleine had not changed his mental state or elicited specific memories, it was probable that those memories, "so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the shapes of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry [...] had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in [his] consciousness" (para. 6). But, now that he had tasted and smelled this familiar cookie with tea and finally uncovered its associated memories, he was able to promptly visualize his aunt's old grey house, the location of her room, and the pavilion opening to the garden behind the house, in addition to the town itself and its main square, its streets, and its country roads, and the series of joyous memories from his childhood that surfaced in response.
Overall, by reading this excerpt, I became more aware of the senses of taste and smell that seem to be so unique in their powerful ability to serve as cues that can randomly trigger involuntary memories. I am more able to analyze these elicited memories when they surface, examining the process and the associated cognitive phenomena from an observer's perspective.
Read the excerpt here: