Taste of Time

The Proust Effect is the phenomenon where a smell, taste, or sensory experience spontaneously unlocks vivid, emotional memories from the past.

The name comes from Marcel Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, where the narrator tastes a madeleine dipped in tea. The flavour immediately transports him to childhood Sunday mornings at his aunt's house.

Involuntary memories feel different. They are anchored in sensation and carry a sense of truth. There is no plot, and yet the moment feels whole. They arrive unbidden, vivid, and intact. One sip or scent, and the entire scene returns at once.

But why? Smell and taste travel directly to the amygdala and hippocampus, the brain regions responsible for emotion and memory. Visual and auditory signals take a longer route, passing through processing centres that analyze and interpret them first. Smell and taste bypass that filter. They reach emotion before thought.

This is why a stranger's perfume can transport you to your grandmother's kitchen. Why the smell of chlorine drops you back into childhood summers. The memory is not a story you tell yourself about the past, but the sensation of briefly inhabiting it again.

Even more fascinating: many of these triggers encode permanently with a single exposure. This is called one-trial learning. When the emotional intensity is high, the brain marks the moment. Stress hormones released during significant moments strengthen memory formation. The brain essentially says: this matters, remember everything.

But emotional intensity can also look like stillness. Sometimes the most ordinary afternoons create the strongest portals. A specific soda. The smell of cut grass. Moments that felt unremarkable at the time.

Between certain ages, memories form with unusual clarity because attention works differently. Children perceive before they interpret. They absorb details without filtering them through narrative or self-consciousness.

The grandmother's perfume stuck not because the visit was highly significant, but because you were fully present when you smelled it. No part of your attention was planning the future or analyzing the past. You were just there, building associations without trying.

As adults, most of us lose this mechanism. We are physically present but mentally elsewhere. We experience moments while simultaneously narrating them, analyzing them, comparing them.

The Proust trigger is a portal to a way of experiencing that most of us no longer access. Complete presence without effort.

But what if we did not have to wait for these portals to find us?

Through sensory triggers, we stumble into portals to the past. But what if we could create portals for the future?

Think of a moment that carries the quality of who you are. Maybe it is the way morning light hits your kitchen counter. The place you sit when you read. The time when you prepare breakfast for your family.

A moment that makes you think: Yes. This is who I am right now.

Pair that moment with a sensory anchor. Choose something distinct and unusual. A specific tea you only drink then. A particular scent you only wear in that moment. Then let the moment and the anchor meet repeatedly.

This is not magical thinking. It is neuroscience. Smell and taste have direct routes to emotional memory. When attention and sensation fire together, they wire together. You are building an association on purpose. The key is consistency.

Then step back from the trigger. Let it rest. Two, ten, twenty years from now, that trigger will return you to this exact moment, to the way you feel inside your life right now.

But here is what I fear: Habituation. Use the trigger too often and the association weakens. With overuse, a scent becomes just a scent. A taste just a taste. So ration exposure. Preserve the portal by not living inside it.

This fear guards one of my most precious memories. That is why, despite my love for Pepsi, my answer to "Coke or Pepsi?" is always Coke.

I am curious to know what you would choose to anchor.