Proust - the Scientist

Abstract

Abstract Proust was not only a French writer, but - based on his incredible scientific knowledge and descriptions in his novel - to some extent, a neurologist and psychologist. Far ahead of his time, Proust illustrated in his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time a link between personal memories and sensory stimuli. In his novels, he explains the mechanism of memory retrieval after perceiving a sensation. Without a doubt the most famous scene of In Search of Lost Time remains the moment when the taste of a French pastry, called “madeleine,” rekindles the childhood memories of the narrator Marcel in the first volume Swann’s Way. Similarly, listening to Vinteuil’s Sonata triggers and maintains Swann’s love for Odette and its expression in the second volume of the masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. His descriptions reveal that human senses are not only linked to personal memories, but may also trigger them. Moreover, contemporary studies in the biological field have shown that there are correlations between stimuli and intangible feelings and states of mind, such as love, hatred, and sympathy, primarily located in the amygdala of the human brain. Reading Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time through the lens of current neurological studies opens an interesting and innovative perspective on the subject of memory retrieval and shows that he was not “only” a writer, but also an observational scientist.