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Who does not know the story of Proust’s madeleine? These few lines of Marcel Proust have become an expression symbolizing the return of a memory through a smell, a flavor… A power of food that a team of British researchers has just confirmed.
Who has never remembered, tasting a dish that we used to eat as a child, a particular memory, precisely linked to this food? Everyone has experienced this feeling at least once.
Awakened senses and awakened memories
Thanks to its taste and its smell, food has the wonderful power to make us relive memories and events of the past. It is this phenomenon that scientists from the University of Lancaster, in the United Kingdom, have chosen to study.
They wanted to know if through our senses we were indeed able to remember old events, sometimes buried deep in our memory. For this, they chose twelve seniors, for whom 72 memories were reported. Half of the memories were related to food, the second half were not.
3D printed edible dumplings
The scientists then replicated very precisely the tastes and smells of these “memory foods”. Made by 3D printing, these edible gel pellets perfectly presented the taste and smell of remembrance food. The volunteers therefore had to eat these replicas of their food and recount their memory.
Recalling a green Thai curry dinner in Cambodia, one attendee recalled: “We went into the kitchen, which was very basic, and we were sitting on the floor cooking all sorts of greens, which I have no idea what they were. And then we helped them cook them, sauté them, then we helped them prepare them…”.
But after being exposed to the 3D dumpling of Thai green curry, the participant gave a more detailed recollection of “chopping sounds from chopping vegetables, me sitting cross-legged on the floor with my friend, chatting together. And then when we would go out, we would put stuff on the tables, the rest of the group would go out and we would sit on long tables outside, in front of the school, so it’s outside in the open air to eat”.
In all participants, the researchers were struck by the large number of memories associated with flavors and this real feeling of being brought back in time. All of them recounted with more precision and detail the “memory scene” and the emotions felt at the time.
Good in your body, good in your head!
Very intense memories
The participants themselves were surprised at the intensity with which they were able to remember. For the main author of this work, Professor Corina Sas, “the 3D-printed smell and flavors prompted memory retrieval, eliciting positive emotional experiences, with rich and intense sensations, which participants deeply enjoyed”.
Some of them have even suggested to researchers that it is a help for people with dementia, to be able to reconstruct their memories and the highlights of their past. Others suggested the idea of creating a scrapbook of food memories.
So many relevant suggestions for Dr. Vaiva Kalnikaitė who said: “We finally have a technology that can help reconstruct memories by using the flavor and smell of different foods in very compact forms. These are the strongest clues to help us remember.”.