The language of the past

There has been a lot of work on the book recently, and so not much time for blogging. But I have been writing about my interviews with my grandmother, Martha, about her earliest memories. In this article for the Guardian, I describe how I took a different tack with my interviewing, and arranged for her to be interviewed in Yiddish.

This blog post for Psychology Today follows up the Guardian piece with some more detail on the science behind the switch of language.

I'll be talking some more on this topic on Woman's Hour on Friday 22 April.

Event at The School of Life

On Monday 14 March I am doing an event on memory at The School of Life. Here's the blurb:

We all rely on our memories to help us to make sense of who we are. But memory is a notorious trickster, prone to all kinds of distortions. Many of us, as we get older, complain that our memories let us down. In this event, author and psychologist Charles Fernyhough draws on the latest research into this endlessly fascinating topic to show how we can harness the slippery power of memory in our everyday lives. He asks whether we can trust childhood memories, and how we can boost our chances of remembering what we want to remember. Our pasts are precious to us, but they are also in some senses unknowable. A deeper understanding of why we remember and forget can give us a better chance of connecting to the truth about who we are.

 You can book for the event by following this link. I hope to see some readers there!

The madeleine moment

This week I've been working on what's become known as Proustian memory, after the famous scene in the first volume of Marcel Proust's masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. Struggling to recapture details of his childhood and youth, the narrator Marcel tastes a piece of a 'petite madeleine' cake steeped in lime-blossom tea, and something very odd happens:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1 (p. 60 of the edition pictured)

What follows is one of the most famous examples of remembering in literature. I am re-reading this extraordinary passage, however, conscious that the reality of the Proust phenomenon may not match up with its popular conceptions. Proust is everywhere in the neuroscience of learning and memory (I myself heard him quoted in undergraduate lectures on the topic). But do these invocations of the great man get Proust right?

Although Marcel's moment with the madeleine ultimately leads to the recapturing of memories of his childhood village of Combray, it is not an instantaneous process. As Douwe Draaisma has pointed out, Marcel actually faces a struggle to make sense of his feelings at the moment of tasting the madeleine. Further tastings don't work, at least not initially. "It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself." (ibid., p. 61). The only way forward lies in deep, repeated plunges of introspection, after which, eventually, something starts to stir: "I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed." (p. 62). 

Even this isn't quite enough, and Marcel has to repeat the examination of his own experience "ten times over" (p. 63). It is as though the gustatory memory needs to make contact with the visual one, and they don't quite speak the same language. Douwe Draaisma concludes that the typical conception of Proustian memory as launching us immediately back into the past isn't quite true to what Proust wrote:

In that sense, the scene with the madeleine is anything but a Proust phenomenon; it took the narrator a great deal of time to associate his spoonful of tea and the crumbs of the cake with remembered images. What emerged from one moment to the next was the association with a feeling, a feeling of delight; the remembered image was still a long way in coming.

Douwe Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older (CUP), p. 33

I did a quick survey on Twitter and Facebook and found that many of my online friends had had Proustian memory experiences. Many of these redolent sensory moments, as you would expect, centred around the smell and taste of food. I am interested to know more about whether people's Proustian memories are instantaneous, as the received wisdom has it, or more drawn-out and effortful. 

It's important to remember that Proust has plenty more to say about memory over the seven volumes of the novel, and that some of Marcel's later sensory encounters with the past have a much more immediate effect. There is some fascinating research on the historical influences on Proust's thinking about memory, and there is also a ton of great new science unpicking whether Proust was right about the power of smell and taste as triggers of memory (more on these topics another time). There is no doubt that the author remained convinced of their power, though, and it is only fitting that Marcel should get the last word:

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1 (pp. 63-64 of the edition pictured)

Slippery memories and the tasks of fiction

I recently had an opportunity to write a guest post for the online magazine OnFiction, whose focus is on psychological processes in the reading and writing of fiction. I chose to look at how novelists might benefit from embracing the reconstructive view of memory. You can read the piece here.

Changes

If you have joined me from The Ladybird Papers, thanks for hopping over. As you'll have noticed, my focus has changed slightly over the last year, with more posts on autobiographical memory (reflecting the topic of my next book). I'll still be posting on developmental psychology topics, though, and anything else that takes my fancy.

Talking about the past

In my latest Psychology Today blog post, I pick up on the theme of memory development to examine the role played by conversations about the past in the organization of children's memories. This includes a look at some new research which shows that mothers' style of talking about the past with their preschoolers shows its influence even into adolescence. You can read the new post here.

The shifting boundary of childhood amnesia

Adults forget their early childhoods, but can children remember them? In my latest post on my Psychology Today blog, I look at some new research that addresses this question.