by Meik Wiking
“Eating s’mores [melted marshmallows and chocolate sandwiched between graham crackers] with my best friends and my cross-country teammates during my high school senior year—they were the best s’mores I ever had. We were sitting in front of the bonfire in the fall. The New England countryside is absolutely gorgeous. I thought I couldn’t be happier at that moment, and I really feel like that is my happiest moment.”
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We are all aware of the journey a taste can trigger when it comes to memory. You taste the limoncello and instantly you are transported back to that summer in Italy and can sense the warm evening air on your skin. It is the feeling when past happiness is momentarily restored. We have all experienced tastes, sounds, smells, sights or a touch that sends us back there, a sensation that reminds you that you were once loved, that you were happy.
The link between our senses and our memory is a common theme in literature. Gabriel García Márquez opens Love in the Age of Cholera by stating that the scent of bitter almonds always reminded Dr. Juvenal Urbino of unrequited love. Our senses can trigger and retrieve memories. This is sometimes referred to as the “Proust phenomenon” or a “madeleine moment.” In Search of Lost Time is considered Marcel Proust’s most prominent work. Its seven volumes cover 3,000 pages. In the first volume, the character Marcel tastes a madeleine, dipped in tea, and memories from his childhood flood back to him:
She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than . . . an exquisite pleasure invaded my senses . . . Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?
Several scholars have now pointed out that the original madeleine moment by Proust was in fact not what we now consider a madeleine moment. A madeleine moment is a spontaneous and vivid memory that is easily retrieved and triggered by a taste, but Marcel has to work hard to retrieve the memory and makes several attempts.
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I know that Proust gets the credit for describing the link between taste and memory, but I think Winnie the Pooh said it best. He’s discussing with Piglet the first thing they think of in the morning. Winnie the Pooh’s first thought is What’s for breakfast?, while Piglet thinks of what exciting things are going to happen that day. And Winnie the Pooh replies that that is the same thing. He understands that our experiences, our memories, are shaped by what we taste. See, no need to spend 3,000 pages on it!
Whether you pick Proust or Pooh as your prophet, the lesson here is to use all your senses to your advantage. Be aware of what you see, smell, hear and feel when you are happy.
A good example is given by one of the participants in the Happy Memory Study we conducted at the Happiness Research Institute, an American in his fifties.
We were in a house on a beach for six days in a row. I would get up in the dark early mornings to listen to the ocean roar and watch the warm sunrise. Later, I would walk with the woman of my life on the beach and birdwatch. After the walk, I would use my smartphone to submit birdwatching data to an international bird database while we had coffee together. The joy of seeing nature, hearing nature, touching the sand and helping bird science made this trip with the woman of my life very special. I remember because it was recent, and because it involved the loves of my life—nature, birdwatching and doing activities we both love with my partner. Also, by myself, staring into the darkness before sunrise and listening to the ocean cultivated profound inner peace, as did walking the beach.
Take heed of this. Take it all in. This man notices all different types of sensory input: the sound of the roaring ocean, the sight of the birds in the sky and the warmth of the rising sun. Also, I think he really likes birdwatching.
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Meik Wiking
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Meik Wiking
HAPPY MEMORY TIP:
CREATE UNIQUE MEMORY TRIGGERS
You remember things by association—so make sure you place something in your experience that can take you back to this exact moment.
Even if we have not read about Proust’s narrator’s venture into a stream of consciousness set off by a madeleine dipped in tea, we may harness the power of Proustian moments.
The more of your senses—sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch—you can use, the more vividly you can remember; and the more cues you line up, the more likely it is that you can hold on to that memory and retrieve it.
Spontaneous memories are typically a result of associations. A detail from the memory is repeated, and that trigger activates the memory. The best triggers are those associations that are linked only to one memory.
If I smell coffee, I enjoy the aroma tremendously, but because I have smelled coffee so many times there is no single memory that is likely to be retrieved by me smelling it. On the other hand, if I smell dried seaweed, I will remember a beautiful day in July. I had been spearfishing and had caught three flounders and was sitting on a warm rock, looking out over the sea. My breathing was deep and I felt relaxed, at peace and happy. I wanted to hold on to that moment and store it. So I took a good whiff of a handful of dried seaweed to increase the odds of that happening.
So, next time you’re really happy and want to capture the moment, take notice of the input from all your senses. Is there a unique scent, sound, texture or taste? Work that into your long-term memory.
INCENSE AND SENSE-ABILITY
When I visit London I usually stay at the same hotel.
There are two things that always strike me there. First, whatever room I stay in, there is a copy da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine hanging over the bed. An ermine is a ferret-like animal and this one looks quite ferocious, with red eyes and sharp claws, and I can’t get over the fact that at one point in this hotel’s history there was a meeting where someone said, “You know that painting with the creepy ermine? We should put that painting in every room.”
The second thing that strikes me is the scent. Some hotels are perfumed with bespoke fragrances that are an integral part of their brand. One Swiss hotel chain wanted their guests to smell Switzerland so they had a unique fragrance made. Their signature scent has the smell of mountain air with a hint of money.
Companies like Air Aroma and ScentAir work with hotels and shops to create these scent-specific locations. One of ScentAir’s clients is the M&M World store at Leicester Square in London. “What they sell comes pre-packaged,” ScentAir UK’s managing director Christopher Pratt said in an interview for the Independent, “so although it looked like the place should smell of chocolate, it didn’t.” It does now. Okay, you get the whiff of the idea.
But why does scent matter? It all comes down to creating a unique and multisensory experience that can be converted into memories for the guests or customers. “We’re creating a lasting memory,” explains Carly Fowler from Air Aroma. “Scent has the ability to directly influence how a hotel is perceived and remembered. From the moment guests arrive, they want to feel that their experience is special.”
But the thing is, smells don’t have any meaning prior to being associated with an experience. When a scent is experienced with something, that is what they become associated with and represent. We dislike the smell of rubbish because we know that it is the smell of rubbish. Or, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Wait, what is that rotten smell? Okay, who the heck is having sürströmming? (Fermented herring smells so strong it has to be eaten outside.) I bet it’s Uncle Claudius. There is something fishy about that guy.
DOES THIS MEMORY SMELL FUNNY TO YOU?
I think if Marie K
ondo—the author of The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up—was a superhero, her archenemy could have been Andy Warhol. By the way, I think her superpower would be reuniting single socks.
Warhol is best known for his cans of soup, his Marilyn Monroes and for coining the phrase “fifteen minutes of fame.” Less well known is his habit of collecting. Between the early sixties and his death in 1987 he created over six hundred time capsules with hundreds of thousands of objects in them: an ashtray lifted from a fancy restaurant, Christmas wrapping paper, unopened letters, gallery invitations, a picture of Elvis, business cards, junk mail, fan letters, LPs, toenail clippings, dead ants, a lump of concrete and a “Do not disturb” sign from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
If I added some toenail clippings, I have drawers in my apartment that could qualify as time capsules, I guess. But people have been paying $10 to witness the opening of Warhol’s time capsules at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. However, I think the most interesting of Warhol’s collection projects was his Museum of Scent, or permanent smell collection.
Warhol had a passion for perfume. In his memoir, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975), he describes how he switched perfumes all the time to preserve memories attached to each scent.
If I’ve been wearing one perfume for three months, I force myself to give it up, even if I still feel like wearing it, so whenever I smell it again it will always remind me of those three months. I never go back to wearing it again; it becomes part of my permanent smell collection.
Warhol believed that seeing, hearing, touching and tasting are not as powerful as smelling as aids to go back to a particular memory. By storing smells in bottles, he felt in control of his memories and would choose which memories to visit based on what mood he was in. “It’s a neat way to reminisce,” he said. One of the theories behind the importance of scent is that smell is linked to the limbic system in our brains, which is believed to be connected to memory and emotion.
Warhol was buried with a bottle of perfume called Beautiful by Estée Lauder. It has been described as “the fragrance of a thousand flowers.” The top notes include rose, lily and mandarin, on a warm base of amber and sandalwood. It was launched in 1985. I wonder what happened that year that made him want to be buried with it.
Being buried with your favorite perfume may be a bit extravagant for some. When my time comes, I would like it kept simple. You know, just the standard bagpipes, gun salutes and five passing fighter jets. Also, my one-room apartment should have a minibar—gin and tonic and Oban whisky—and a replica of Lady with an Ermine.
HAPPY MEMORY TIP:
EVERY HAPPY MEMORY DESERVES A SOUNDTRACK
What comes to mind when you hear “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio, “Bailamos” by Enrique Iglesias or “White Flag” by Dido? They were in the charts in 1995, 1999 and 2004.
In 1995, I was working in a cinema and Dangerous Minds, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, was showing; in 1999, I was in Spain and every bar was “Bailamos” crazy; and in 2004, Dido was my go-to music when I was cycling around Copenhagen. So those are the scenes that occur in my mind’s eye when those songs play. The smell of popcorn, the taste of whisky and the sight of the city on my commute at the time reappear.
Music can make us travel in time just as well as any scent. One note and we’re taken back to that time, that place, that mood. You’re right back there, as if you never left. As they say, behind every favorite song there is an untold story.
And the time-traveling aspect may shape our taste in music.
In 2018, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, an economist and writer for The New York Times, explored data from Spotify. He examined every song that topped the charts from 1960 to 2000 and how frequently those songs were listened to by different people. No big surprise: age is a big determinant of our musical taste. Not a lot of men in their eighties have Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” on their playlist. (Only policemen in their forties do. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you need to google it right now.) The study concluded that grown men and women stick with the music that captivated them in their earliest adolescence.
For instance, “Creep” by Radiohead is rather popular among men born in 1977. It is the 164th most-played song in that age group—but it is not in the top three hundred for people born in 1967 or 1987. “Creep” came out when the men who love it were about fifteen years old—and that seems to be the consistent pattern. Stephens-Davidowitz found that the songs most popular among men are those that were first released when they were between fifteen and sixteen years old; for women, the magic music age is between eleven and fifteen. So, if you loved the music as a teen, you will love it forever.
You may use that knowledge to know how to get the party started or to get people talking about their adolescent memories—or you may want to make sure your happiest moments have a soundtrack.
Source: “The Songs that Bind,” The New York Times, 2018. Analysis of Spotify data by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.
THE FALSE MEMORY DIET
Now, we know that our senses allow us to store and retrieve more vivid memories. A taste can trigger a memory. But our memories can also have an impact on which tastes we seek out, and this is true even for false memories.
Elizabeth Loftus is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and she has conducted some fascinating studies on faulty memories and how they can influence our behavior.
The 2008 study “Asparagus, a Love Story—Healthier Eating Could be Just a False Memory Away” involved 231 subjects, who thought they were participating in a study on the relationship between personality and food preferences and completed a raft of surveys. One survey assessed their desire to eat each of the thirty-two separate dishes listed, including sautéed asparagus spears, and it was presented in the form of a regular menu, with appetizers, soups, and so on.
Another survey was about the cost of food and the participants’ willingness to pay for twenty-one different food items, including rice, tortilla chips, courgette and asparagus at a grocery store.
These surveys were conducted several times and, over the course of their study, Loftus and her colleagues had planted the false memory that some of the participants loved to eat asparagus when they were children. Other participants were not manipulated into thinking this way; these formed the control group.
Relative to the control group, data taken from the participants who now believed they loved asparagus as kids demonstrated that these new (and false) memories had consequences, among them an increased general liking of asparagus, greater desire to eat asparagus in a restaurant and a willingness to pay more for asparagus in the grocery shop.
This study reminded me of a memory. When I was a kid, my friends, my mother and I used to pretend to be pirates and used celery sticks as rapiers. I don’t like celery sticks, but I still buy them from time to time. You know—in case the pirates come back.
HAPPY MEMORY TIP:
CREATE A MEMORY DISH
If you enjoy cooking, you may want to link certain tastes or even dishes to happy memories.
This summer, my girlfriend and I created a “memory dish” after spending a wonderful day on the island of Bornholm, a day I wanted to remember. We had a slow breakfast with a side of crosswords and went swimming in the afternoon, alternating between the cool water of the Baltic Sea and warm rocks heated by the sun. Later, gin and tonics joined the party, which may explain why I forget what we had for dinner. But I remember that dessert was cherries eaten straight from the trees in the nearby forest.
We watched the light from the sunset by the water and walked back towards my cabin, only to notice that a new light was hovering over the horizon over Gudhjem (literal meaning, “God’s home’), a charming small town on the eastern coast. The town has also given its name to the classic Danish smørrebrød Sol over Gudhjem (literal meaning, “sun over God’s home’). Be careful pronouncing it in Danish—it can lead to irritable vowel syndrome.
The new ligh
t on the horizon was the moon rising. So, naturally, we called the new dish Moon over God’s Home. It consists of a poached egg on smoked shrimp (a speciality of Bornholm) on toast. When you cut the poached egg on the dark shrimps, you can see the moon rise—and remember a perfect summer’s day.
Meik Wiking
Meik Wiking
HAPPY MEMORY TIP:
THE MEMORY LANE WALKING TOUR
Visit places that can trigger memories of good times.
So, we know that being at the place where a certain event happened will make you remember it better. We use our sense of sight to be reminded of a memory. Armed with that fact, it makes good sense—and good fun—to go on a literal walk down memory lane.
Last summer, as I was researching this book, my girlfriend and I were visiting my dad, Wolf, and I had asked him to plan a “Tour de Wolf,” a walk around Aarhus, the second-biggest city in Denmark. My dad had lived there in the sixties, when he was working in advertising, and moved back there some years ago.
“I want to see where you lived, where you worked and where you got drunk,” I said.
That afternoon, we visited the places where he had worked. We walked his walk to work in the morning. We saw the Teater Bodega, where my dad and his colleagues would have dinner and a pint, the streets where the uniformed chauffeurs would wait outside the houses, shining the cars, and the chemist’s where my mother worked when my parents first met. I remembered her telling stories about hating the leeches, and that she had to call her boss Her Apotekeren (“Mr. Pharmacist’).