Marxant Ambients

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Proust's Madeleine: the link between fragrances and memories

The first volume of  In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust narrates the famous fragment in which the smell and flavour of a madeleine soaked in tea unleashes in the writer a neverending sequence of childhood memories, just when the first part sets off, from a total of seven volumes of his work. 

In this way, the madeleine has become the characteristic proustian symbol by exellence to claim the provoking power of the senses of the smell and the taste, taking us to a trip to any remote place in our memory.


More recently, researchers from Utrech University, in the Netherlands, have published a study about cognition and emotion that confirms that the memories and experiences from the past are more intense when there is a smell related to them, just as Proust describes in his work.


The wisdom of the nose: The science of smell applied to our daily lives. 


The research has made possible for us to obtain more information about how our smell sense works, capable of preserving in the memory of our brain past emotions and moments in all detail.
Today, we know that the smell provides a wide amount of data about the flavour of food and our surroundings,  even to the point of conditioning our behaviour as consumers.


Avery Gilbert, a psychology PhD for Pennsylvania University is the author of this publication from  2008, and defines himself as a "smell scientist" 
His interest for animal behaviour lead him to investigate the sense of human smell, thus becoming an expert in this field. 
His research on human smell perception has been developed and applied by him, both in the research and business fields, as a member of R&D of many perfume focused multinationals.