I have a.
So welcome. This is this is the fifth seminar in the country's memory network series.
Also, for those of you who don't know me, I'm the organiser.
And today's topic is Proustian memory. All throughout the year, we will keep trying to reduce the conceptual gap between mind and brain.
And today is a very is a crowd pleasing topic, which is, of course, the neuroscience you already have.
You probably know the book proofs of neuroscientist and Truth under which perhaps but one of the earliest
articles which is published on this very topic was by all speakers today called Madeleines and Neuro Modernism,
which came out in 1998. Customers kindly produce a book with a with her some copies, if you'd like, one at the end of the seminar.
So they're going to speak together. And I will just first introduce Professor Gordon Sheppard,
who's professor of neurobiology at Yale Medical School, where he also served as a deputy provost.
He's a pioneer in the neuro analysis of the olfactory system, and he introduced the field time,
sight, brain, Microsoft's dendritic, dendritic synopsis and neuro gastronomy.
He also develops new fields of computational neuroscience and neuro informatics.
And his books, the synaptic Organisation of the Brain Neurobiology, are used widely all over the world of textbooks.
He's been the chief editor of the Journal of Neurophysiology and the Journal of Neuroscience.
He's also our father, his collaborator today, our professor Kirsten Sheppard.
Bob who our own professorship with Bob, who is in fact on the faculty of English here, where she teaches modern drama.
Her book Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett was published this year by Columbia University Press.
She is the author of a groundbreaking book called Silence on the Stage, published by the Princeton University Press.
I think we could you just about this.
Yes, maybe this one is that, which I would highly recommend.
She's also author of Ibsen and the Early Modernist Theatre.
She's the current knowledge exchange and public engagement champion for the Humanities at Oxford.
Please join me in welcoming the speakers today. Thank you very much.
May I turn it over to my collaborator? No, really.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. And Kirsten and I will attempt to give you a follow up to the article we wrote many years ago,
in which it seemed there was an opportunity to bring together an analysis of a literary
described episode and the neuroscience that could give insight into that episode.
And so it gave the opportunity to address some of the interpretations by the author
himself and by critics of this famous episode of The Madeleines and Memory,
and to show how neuroscience can provide insights that have relevance to events that are described in literature.
And so it really is a cross cultural opportunity.
And so we invite all of you to join with us.
And of course, we regard this entirely as an experiment.
We are not Proustian. We were only drawn to this episode as an opportunity.
And so we hope to learn as much from the discussion with all of you as we hope we can communicate to you.
So please take it from there.
Yes. So we're going to go through this in four parts.
So I will start and will actually just analyse the moment.
We just want to look at the moment, the famous moment, and go through it in some detail.
And then I'll hand over to Gordon and then [INAUDIBLE] hand back in only like ping pong.
But we will we will try to do it in an integrated way.
So I'll lead off with this episode. Shall we start part one?
Yeah. Part one. There we are. Part one analysis of the moment, which let's see, to start with the quote we go.
So here's one of the famous bits of it, but one 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 unsubstantial. 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.
So this is the iconic moment that's really become a literary cliche.
It's used very often. You'll see it in the media, used to indicate instantaneous and intense memory.
We come across it all the time. But its precise nature, we feel, has been misunderstood.
So there are three points about that. This is not, in fact, an instance of involuntary memory, but a combination of involuntary involuntary recall.
And the second thing is the trigger is as much smell as taste.
Smell is the most important component of flavour as you will be hearing.
And Paris recognises this.
Yet popular references to the Madeleine episode usually assume that the trigger is taste alone or it's characterised in that way.
And thirdly, the memory does not emerge right away all of a sudden, but is delayed and in fact requires quite a bit of conscious effort.
Proust's famous statement that might emerge from my teacup, in fact, comes at the end of a long process of recall.
So let's analyse his description of what happened. We won't be looking at the full passage as it takes several pages, which is part of our point.
But let's go through the key moments.
So to begin with, he shows that certain very specific conditions need to be in place in order for involuntary memory to occur.
We're actually getting ahead of ourselves. One is that the narrator is in a depressed, dejected state.
His word is oppressed by the gloomy weather and the sad future he envisions.
And the second thing is, although he is doing something that is habitual in that it's a physical act,
he does all the time in taking food in his mouth.
He doesn't normally drink tea, and he makes that point in the passage.
So the circumstances are out of the ordinary for him. So.
While the action itself is an ordinary thing that you do all the time and he's done all the time, the circumstances are unusual.
And the other thing is that a final condition is that the memory that eventually emerges must have been a forgotten one.
It was forgotten. It's totally unexpected, has not been thought about for years and years.
And now we're on to the second quotation. Yeah.
So. But was it an involuntary memory then?
And so Chris Tex says otherwise. So here's the long bit.
I begin again to ask myself what could have been this unremembered state?
I decided to attempt to make it reappear. I retrace my thoughts to the moment at which I drank the first spoonful of tea.
I rediscovered the same state. I ask my mind to make one further effort to bring back once more the fleeting sensation.
I shut out every obstacle. I compelled my mind for a change, to enjoy the distraction, which I have just denied it.
For the second time, I clear an empty space in front of it. I place in position before my mind's eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful.
And I feel something start within me. I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly.
Undoubtedly. What is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory,
which being linked to that taste is trying to follow it into my conscious mind ten times over.
I must say the task and suddenly the memory revealed itself is how that ends.
So he shows a very specific sequence of events.
One is that the sensory stimulus. First triggers an intense emotional state.
So elation, joy, happiness. And then the specific memory.
Now, let's see, I think a quotation. Do we want to think positively?
Yeah. So here we go. The emotions evoked by the Madeleine are crucial to the whole theoretical edifice of critical thought on this episode.
He goes on to say, An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses.
So the emotion is described as this exquisite pleasure, something isolated, detached with no suggestion of its origin.
This new sensation had the effect which love has of filling me with the precious essence.
Whence could it have come to me this all powerful joy?
I sense that it was connected with the taste of the tea and cake, but that it was infinitely transient,
but that it infinitely transcended those savours could not indeed be of the same nature.
Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?
And so this emotional state defies mortality.
It's so transcendent. He says, I ceased to feel I was mediocre, contingent, mortal.
The narrator attempts to understand it. He asks, Where did it come from?
What did it mean? How could I grasp it?
So he tries to prolong it by drinking a second mouthful, but immediately the sensation starts to lessen and this is desensitisation occurring.
And we've all felt this when you have a very powerful trigger and then you attempt to enjoy it, and then after a while it sort of wanes.
And this can also be an unpleasant smell, for instance, that you sort of lessens as time goes on.
So the sensory adaptation takes place and it gets in the way of him hanging on to the experience.
But he's determined to make the emotional state reappear, as he says.
And note that so far no mention has yet been made of combining a memory has not yet emerged in a tangible way by conscious and creative effort,
and the emphasis here is on creative effort. So he's clearing his mind.
He's concentrating. He's ignoring extraneous sounds and sights.
He's able to call something forth, something, quote, quivering, but still indistinct.
And he often uses this term create in this section, something is trying to struggle up from,
quote, my very depths, but, quote, I no longer feel anything.
So ten times over, I must begin again. So just when he's about to give up and resign himself to losing that moment forever,
to never knowing what it was that was trying to struggle forth from his unconscious, suddenly the memory appeared,
he says, his aunt giving him a bit of her teeth of Madeleine as a child and way only once
the specific place is located does the full memory flood over him immediately.
The old grey house on the street emerges. The town, the square, the streets, the gardens, the people.
All of this, which is assuming form and substance, emerged from my cup of tea.
So to conclude this little first section here, there are some things about this episode to note.
There's a paradox in that the extraordinary state is brought about by a completely ordinary act and recalls a memory that is likewise unremarkable.
It's only remarkable to the individual. The episode gets at the essence of being a writer in time regained his.
Says that the moment of tasting the madeleine is in and of itself insignificant.
The significance has to be extracted. And so here he links the Madeleine episode to his larger aesthetic project,
saying that it is through this process of extraction that the writer arrives finally at for real life and quote, real life is literature.
And finally, Bruce recognises at once that it is a combination of taste and smell that generates this intense emotional state,
as he calls them, souls remembering. And this is where we go over to you.
Oh, I was finding this quite interesting. So.
So maybe we'll hold off then.
Any discussion points until I've shown you what neuroscience is all about and how it might give insight into this episode,
and then we can begin to encourage you to join in it.
So what about the science of this literary moment?
So we're going to be concerned with the brain, because all of our experience is actually,
even though stimulated by our environment, is created for ourselves by our brain.
And this first really came home to me when I got increasingly interested in flavour and
flavour is actually at the core of the Madeleine incident because he's describing a flavour,
he calls it a taste. He also includes smell.
And when we wrote our original article, we pretty much kept those regarded those as separate compartments.
But in the meantime, it's become obvious to those of us working on smell and taste that what we're really talking about is flavour.
And flavour is a combination of all of the senses involved in our appreciation, our perception of the food or or drink that we take into our mouths.
And the first key thing that we all want to recognise is the flavour is not in the food.
Flavour is created by the brain.
And so it's very similar in that sense and that way to colour, because colour isn't in the objects that we see having colour around us.
Colour is created from the different wavelengths that are bouncing off all of us and is created
as a as a perception to inform and elaborate on our experience of the visual world around us.
We have an expert on the visual system of August.
And so we will be able to consult with him if we need more light thrown on this aspect but flavour, then following on that will be a coloured light.
Coloured light. There you are created out of wavelengths.
So in the same way the metal, in the the sense, the perception that we refer to Proust or to Marcel or who is Marcel.
All right. That Marcel has is not in the madeleine, but is the flavour of this created by his brain.
And what about that brain? So if we are talking only about the sense of smell,
then we have a that occurs by auto nasal inspiration of the air to bring in what's outside in the madeleine before we consume it.
That stimulates the olfactory cells in the top of the nasal cavity.
They send their fibres to the olfactory bulb, which forms and spatial pattern representing those molecules.
I'm going to spare you all of the circuits and and dynamics that we have carried out in many others over the years,
just to say that a pattern is created. We actually call it an odour image, a smell image pattern that represents those different molecules.
And so it's created entirely by the brain. And in order that the brain can then process that information as a pattern,
just as the visual system takes a pattern of stimulation of the retina and projects that further to the brain for processing,
and that next goes to the olfactory cortex where further processing takes place.
So that instead of an image of the of the sensory input and an image that is in terms of the language of the brain is created.
And we call this a smell object or an odour object, because now it's in a form that the brain can use to send it on to other parts of the brain.
And so in the case of just the sense of smell, it goes to the highest level of of perception,
the in the prefrontal cortex in what is called the orbitofrontal cortex, medium and lateral.
So that's the stimulation of the olfactory part of the brain.
And from that, we get a perception of the smell. However,
we're dealing in this case and in all cases in which we consume something so that
it's inside our mouth with a different kind of stimulation of the factory system.
And this happens when we breathe out. So that the volatiles that are released from what is in our mouth.
And it's shown here as a piece of food. But it could be just the fluid, or it could be a very small biscuit, as in the case of the madeleine.
A small cake.
And but within the mouth, the volatiles are released as we digest, as we manipulate the food in our mouths so that they're caught by the.
Breathing out. You can imagine yourself.
You breathe out and that carries volatiles again up into the nasal cavity to stimulate the olfactory receptor cells.
And the whole process in the olfactory system is repeated.
But now there's an enormous difference, because not only is the olfactory system activated, but every other sensory system in the brain.
So that touch system is activated by the touch of the madeleine in the mouth and the teeth,
the taste system, the taste buds in the on the tongue, and the further back activate the taste system.
And so the touch system senses fibres up to the somatic sensory part of the cerebral cortex.
The taste system sends its fibres up to the taste part of the cerebral cortex.
The visual system has already been activated by seeing the matter then as it's taken and put into the mouth and the cup of tea,
and we'll see how important vision is as well.
And even the auditory system is activated as you slosh around the tea in your mouth and crunch the madeleine.
And just think about how important Rice Krispies Crunchy is to Sally Rice Krispies.
And so now we're we're getting into understanding what it is that makes a particular food or or beverage attractive.
And so now you see, we're stimulating quite a bit of the brain, and this is only sensory discrimination.
Now we have to recognise that the motor system in our heads is also being activated.
We never have flavours, never a passive sense.
There's always an active sense.
So when we take something in our mouth, we have to move our mouth and begin to use our tongues to manipulate the food or our liquid.
So this is what we call an active sense or active touch.
And this completely different from looking straight forward and seeing somebody and activating only
the the visual system until we start to examine that person more and be more actively involved.
And now I haven't even talked about what was so important for Proust and that with all the emotions.
So first and remember memory. So first of all, they're our memory systems, then they're activated and I can't even show them there.
I'll show you them in the animation. But there are memory systems involving the hippocampus and others.
There are emotional systems that are connected,
particularly to the olfactory and smell system that are aroused by different kinds of stimuli and the experience of them.
There are all the systems involved in motivation.
Usually we are motivated when we're hungry, we're motivated when we see something that we really like.
It's a little different with Proust because he's not motivated to do anything,
and so it's only his aunt who provides him with something that then stimulates his motivation.
And so all of that effort to bring forth that unremembered memory involves the motivational systems,
and these are tremendously important in human and animal animal life.
There are reward systems that involve the transmitter called dopamine,
that are systems that are activated when we achieve the conservation of something that we feel is rewarding.
And so the reward systems obviously flooded with Marcel as he consumed the and then found the found the final the final goal of the of the memory.
And finally, there are the language systems. So.
Cruz could never have described this incident without it connecting to the language systems in a way that enabled him to explain them,
enabled him to explain emotion that might not be so closely related to.
Excuse me. Emotions are not necessarily connected to our language systems without some effort.
And so and I believe there there are passages that relate to how difficult it was to express in words the emotions that were called forward.
And so that emphasises how important language is to the human experience of memory and emotion and all the other things.
So that's an introduction to just the most superficial view of the brain systems that are involved.
And now I'm going to show you an animation that puts them into a sequence.
It seemed to me that seeing this still view of the of the brain and the head and everything going on here with consuming the morsel of
food didn't really give you the full and full insight into how complex this series of movements and sensations and and emotions are.
And so I thought an animation would help to do that.
So let's go to. How the brain creates flavour from food.
So this whole thing of what I call neuro gastronomy, because it amplifies our view of gastronomy, which is the pleasure we get from the food we eat.
And the brain is so central to the experience that it's an attempt to give you this this more enlarged view.
And so I'm going to play this now, and you can listen to it, and then I'll be interrupted from time to time.
First, this is a valley.
Face eating actually begins when we start to think about food and flavours using our highest brain centres, especially the prefrontal cortex.
We may shop for the food prepared or sit down at a restaurant, seeing food and sensing aromas activate our main reward system on Pablo's dogs.
Autonomic centres for salivation begin to be active. So this is all in terms I don't have an animation for just for the the Proustian incident,
but this gives you the larger context of when we when we are preparing to eat.
And this is, of course, lacking in the case of of the of the Proust incident, because he's very depressed and he's not thinking about food.
And so that forms an interesting contrast with the way the system usually works.
We feel hungry due to hormones controlled by the hypothalamus, which activate motivation centres in the brain to want to eat.
This symbolic phase thus involves the critical balance between our expectations of flavour,
nutrition and amount inhibitory restraint by control centres in our frontal lobes.
Stimulation by our senses and our systems for emotions, memories and reward.
And influences from others through our language centres. So.
So these these larger systems here involving emotion, memory and reward and so forth,
are obviously in a different state for for Marcel as he's she's fed the tea.
And so this is an, I think, an interesting variation on the normal way that the system usually gets at this balance,
determines eating a flavourful and healthy diet, avoiding obesity and related disorders.
Next, preliminary analysis. The food is served and the motor systems of our arms, hands and fingers.
Selective bite. We use our eye muscles and visual perception to check out his appearance and breathe in the aroma, but also nasal smell.
Autonomic pathways produced saliva. Next, ingestion.
Our prefrontal cortex system decides to. So the auto nasal is the breathing in.
And that's the one to ingest the food. We move the food to the mouth in head.
So this is auto nasal smell when we're breathing in and sensing the smell of what we're about to eat.
And that that would be what Marcel first sensed as he took the bell for a final test of the aroma.
And the prefrontal cortex decides to ingest the food. The jaw opens.
The tongue is pleased to receive the food. So there are those little white dots on the volatile molecules from the madeleine.
And we take a bite.
The initial analysis, the ingested food immediately activates touch receptors in the mouth and the signals are raised to the court.
So these are the touch receptors here in the touch pathway going up through the thalamus.
And when it reaches the cortex, then we believe that's where consciousness begins, predicts for touch perception.
Control of perception of the food and its flavours all refer to the mouth as quote taste.
The motor system for chewing commences coordinated with breathing.
The food begins to stimulate the taste buds,
activating the taste pathway for conscious perception of taste qualities sweet salt, sour, bitter and umami.
The tongue moves the food to stimulate all the taste buds and pushes it to the teeth.
For mastication, the lips close volatiles are released.
Exhale. So here are the volatiles released from the madeleine that are now going to go up and back through the.
You have no idea how hard it was for the artist to make those little white balls.
It occurs and nasal smell begins. The dopamine reward system responds to the sensory stimuli.
The salivary glands secrete their enzymes. So here's something we're not aware of, and that is that at the back of the mouth, our soft palate is open,
is down, leaving it open for the volatiles to go back through the nasal pharynx and up into the nasal cavity.
And in the same way. We're breathing through our trachea.
And so we're holding all of this in our mouths, enabling this air to go back and forth,
particularly upward and back, so that we can smell what's in our mouths.
And at this, we're totally unaware. And that's something we'll come back to again and again.
Hearing vibrations activate the auditory pathway to give perception of sounds such
as crunchiness that are important in judging the quality and flavour of the food.
Next forming the perceptual image. We're not aware of that.
What we call taste is usually do mostly to recognisable smell.
A better term is therefore flavour. It arises as a unified perceptual image as the association cortical areas
process and relay this information to the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortex.
So these are the association areas around the primary areas and as soon as all of the sensory systems begin to be stimulated together,
they communicate to to enlarge the activation of the cortex through these association areas, which give us the elaboration of the perception.
And so all of this is going on in Marcel's brain without him realising it, repeated chewing produces a mesh, makes the saliva,
the movements of the tongue, and manipulating the food are complex, more complex actually, than tongue movements during speech.
That's one of the most interesting things I found in this in this whole study.
And that is we would think that the tongue movements we use in speech are highly refined and evolve during human evolution.
But it turns out from studies of comparing tongue movements in manipulation of food and tongue movements in speech,
that is the tongue movements manipulating the food in our mouths that are more complex and are
the basis then for what was used then by this by the body to generate the vowels in the brain,
chewing the residential pathways open so the volatiles from the back of the
mouth ascend during exhalation to stimulate the smell receptors in the nose.
Next analysing the perceptual object, memory systems are engaged, telling us that the food is what I like, what I want to hear.
All the systems now that I mentioned before,
many of them during normal eating are already activated as we think about the food we're going to eat in that swelling phase.
But now they get stimulated by the what's actually in the mouth or what I crave.
Emotion systems tell us that this food makes me happy or unhappy.
Sensory Well, it definitely is making making Marcel happy the discrimination systems.
Tell us how this compares with what I expected and with other flavours,
the domain reward system is activated to refer or reject the food language systems
enable us to communicate our judgements around the table using words during chewing.
We're not aware that when we inhale, the food in our mouth does not activate the smell sectors.
Nor are we aware that when we exhale, we so exhale again.
We're totally unaware that the most of the flavour is coming from the activation of the olfactory sensory cells here.
Most of us think that the flavour and the the the smell,
the flavour we associate with the smell is coming from the mouth because that's where the food is and that's where the madeleine is and the tea.
And this is why talking about the taste of the food is so confusing.
And that's why how Marcel is referring to it as well,
and richness of smell to the flavour as human perceives the mash becomes a mesh in which the individual
food elements become fused to produce a continuous perception of a flavour object next swallowing.
When the motion is judged by the prefrontal cortex system to be ready,
the decision is made to swallow the final critical step in taking this foreign substance into the body.
The tongue moves the mesh to the back of the mouth. The prefrontal cortex will to take over the mesh to the swallowing centre which
acts automatically swallowing closes the nasal pharynx and the epiglottis.
So there's the uvula, there is the epiglottis closing off so there's no more breathing so that the swallowing
can take place without choking or without it going up into the nasal cavity.
But this also we're totally unaware that the sensation of flavour continues without us realising
it's been momentarily interrupted to prevent the food from going up into the nose and.
Into the trachea and activates the muscles of the tongue and pharynx to push the mesh through the back of the mouth and into the oesophagus.
Finally, post swallowing. When swallowing is finished, the muscles of the New Zealand epiglottis relax.
Breathing resumed.
And if we pay attention, we're aware of a heightened flavour left over from the fruit in the mouth and the resumption of retro nasal smell.
Finally, the dopamine reward system signals the value of the food consumed and the relative desirability of the food is learned and remembered.
Through synaptic plasticity, when hunger changes to satiation, motivation and emotional systems change,
rejection and the prefrontal control system decides to stop eating,
posting digestive effects throughout the gut and body conditioners for the next meal.
In this most complex of human behavioural systems,
all of the subsystems must be developed for healthy eating to occur and for recollection of unremembered memories.
So this is the system that is work at work during this incident of unremembered memories.
And so again, the key, I think, take home message is that all of this is creating the sensation from the madeleine.
The madeleine is not is only the source of the molecules that then the brain works on that the the the.
The key here is that all of this is taking place then in as the basis for the effort,
the proof then puts forth in order to recall and unremembered memory.
And so we can go back now to the text and ask what how this might relate to some of the criticism and interpretation that's been raised.
Okay. Because we kind of our basic idea is we think Proust was on to this.
We think without necessarily having had any insights like this,
obviously there's a sense that the text is conveying something beyond an ordinary understanding of just, oh, the food is causing this.
There's a sense that he really is aware of some other mechanism going on and he's trying to ascertain what it is and trying to define it.
Oh, here I had one less. Oh, yeah.
So here here are the different levels at which we work in neuroscience to uncover the basis of the neural basis of a particular behaviour,
in this case of a very unhappy person coming into treatment.
And we can, with understanding what happens, see how why you get food so happy.
So that was the animation. And now we literally, in fact, go ahead.
So we thought maybe look a bit at the context, the wider context,
because he wasn't alone in seeing these kinds of moments as really significant and trying to pin them down.
So his fellow modernists were busy with similar ideas.
So James Joyce, Katharine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf were all bent on capturing the elusive, yet meaningful moments that make up who we are.
Because this is so important to Marcel as part of his identity, and he keeps using this term essence.
And I think it's very connected to the notion of identity. Joyce called these moments epiphanies.
For Woolf, there were moments of being both Joyce and processes, such moments as quasi religious.
These regained memories generate emotional states that seem to defy mortality, erase the fear of death, make life worth living.
And all of this, of course, is elaborated in other moments, throughout time regained.
The other modernist I wanted to talk about a Samuel Beckett, who made a famous study of Christ as a very young man in 1931,
in which he seems to agree that the sudden overwhelming appearance of the memory is a miracle.
That's his word, contingent upon a precise set of circumstances relating to the emotional state of the individual.
So we have a big chunk of Beckett's treatise on Proust.
No amount of voluntary manipulation, says Beckett,
can reconstitute in its integrity an impression that the will has, so to speak, buckled into incoherence.
But if by accident and given favourable circumstances, a relaxation of the subject's habit of thought and a reduction of the radius of his memory,
a generally diminished tension of consciousness following upon a phase of extreme discouragement.
If, by some miracle of analogy, the central impression of a past sensation recurs as an immediate stimulus,
which can be instinctively identified by the subject with the model of duplication
whose integral purity has been retained because it has been forgotten,
then the total past sensation not its echo, nor its copy, but this in.
Station itself,
annihilating every spatial and temporal restriction comes in a rush to engulf the subject in all the beauty of its infallible proportion.
So he subscribed to Proust's idea about involuntary memories as, quote, sealed vessels, which is Beckett's term,
which contain the essences of our true selves, preserved intact, only accessible through involuntary recall.
So the key idea here is that they are somehow preserved without being changed,
improves searches for such impressions that have quote, as he says, the power to resuscitate the timeless man within me.
And Beckett constantly uses terms like purity, integrity,
the real he seems to see the same moral and salvation is dimension to involuntary memory that Proust does aesthetically,
despite their drastically different uses of language, the one profuse the other quite sparing.
One of the most interesting connections between Paris and Beckett is the ordinariness paradox I mentioned earlier.
So the idea of habit really fascinated Beckett, as we know.
I mean, Beckett's just looking at his plays, which is my area. They revolve around inconsequential acts.
So taking off your boots, eating a carrot, standing and waiting.
Famously, one critics, of course, said that nothing happens twice in Waiting for Godot, just as in time regained hinges on everyday acts.
What proves calls little things. And both writers, in fact, focus more on states of being than on actions.
Literature after Proust is full of such moments of finding the meaning in the seemingly insignificant, everyday,
routine act and exploring his suggestion that of all human pursuits, the most important is trying to understand what we experience.
To answer the question of quote What did it mean that he posed? We discussed earlier.
Yet for all his insistence, he avoids dogmatism. He says that writers who propound aesthetic theories are guilty of a, quote, gross impropriety.
He says a work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price tag on it.
Writers after Beckett have continued to explore how memory works, for instance.
And I'm picking another playwright, Brian Friel, who in plays like Dancing at Looseness and Living Quarters,
has really explored and put on stage the workings of memory.
In a diary entry, he expressed thoughts on the slipperiness of memory that unconsciously blend an accurate understanding of the
neuroscience of memory and a nod toward Paul recurs ideas about the uncoupling of memory and imagination,
I think. So here is his quotation from Brian Friel's Diaries.
Oops, how did we forget it? No, I think it's their next movie.
No, I think we've got it in. Okay, well, here it is.
The fact is a fiction. Have I imagined this scene?
Then this is Friel writing, or is it a composite of two or three different episodes?
The point is, I don't think it matters. What matters is that for some reason, this vivid memory is there in the storehouse of my mind.
For some reason, the mind has shuffled the pieces of verifiable truth and composed a truth of its own.
For me, it is a truth. And because I acknowledge its peculiar veracity, it becomes a layer in my subsoil.
It becomes part of me. Ultimately it becomes me.
I think you're going to illuminate how that works. Yeah, right.
So I thought I'd add my part of the science in talking about how we recover and that we can bring it into consciousness.
And I'm not going to be able to go into each of the systems in detail,
but I'd like to try to put things in the context of the unconscious aspect of memory and as opposed to the conscious.
So I've told you that the the contribution of rip through layers of smell to flavour occurs without our being conscious of it.
Is everybody clear on that? But that means that flavour is an illusion.
And what we think is one of the most conscious perceptions we have in our lives at least three times a day,
and six or seven or eight, depending on how many cups of coffee we go around with during the day.
It means that what we think is a clear fact that we there's a taste of things in our mouths,
that the taste comes from what's in the in the thing we take into our mouths.
And that is all due to what? The sensation for my mouth is an illusion.
And I'm still impressed with this after having fully realised that from the co-workers and collaborators and
colleagues in the field that this is something that there is no way that you can really be aware of this.
So the next meal you have, sit down and start eating and try to think of those volatiles coming from the back of the mouth,
stimulating the nose and having that referred to the mouth as what you're calling taste.
And it just won't work. And so the this whole edifice of flavour is something that contains unconscious contributions from smell.
And so in that sense, our memory of flavour is an unconscious memory.
This may be a question of semantics, but I think this would be fun to to have as a as a discussion point.
The second is, where was this memory lodged in the brain?
Where was it actually present? We talk about memory traces,
which is simply a word that describes that there must be something there that is actually there in order to be then recalled.
And there's now enough work with brain imaging to address that.
And one of the one of the key points, oh, I did what I did want to indicate this,
that the olfactory system has a particular prevalence in memory of because of the fact that all of the systems, the visual system,
the touch system and the auditory system come into the back of the brain and have
connections that then go forward to be integrated with the and the taste system,
to be integrated with the smell system in the orbitofrontal cortex,
which then has close connections with the so called limbic areas where memories and emotions are that are central to memories and emotions.
And so the one reason that the episode of the Madeleine is this is so strong in improves mind is that involves smell that
has direct access to remember I showed you showed how this system is coming directly into the frontal part of the cortex.
All of the other systems have to be referred to the frontal part.
And so there's a lot of interest in where consciousness arises and usually focussed on the visual system and maybe Ray can comment on this.
But in the olfactory system, in fact, we can go back to that.
The fact is, is to remember, is only two synapses and only two relays away from the these highest levels of the brain.
And so that's one reason why our senses, our sense of of smell and flavour is so immediate.
And this is this is not even a part of the discussion yet of where consciousness arises in the brain,
because most of the focus is on the visual system and on the other sensory systems.
So that's a that's a whole area that I think is going to be very interesting to to explore.
And then finally, I wanted to say that in the case of a memory like cone brain, it's what we call multi-modal.
And that means that it consists of visual recollection.
It consisted of the smell of the tea, the taste of the tea, the recollection of the probably the wind and the sounds of convoy.
They all made this a multi-modal memory.
So the question arises, where are those different parts of the memory?
Where are they retained in the brain? And the best evidence now and I can go into this if you're interested,
is that it's like the memory itself is like a stubbed a hole of perception, like a face actually has a gestalt to it and or a complex pattern.
And it's a characteristic of a complex pattern that is small.
Part of it can be enough to bring back the whole pattern.
And so that, in a sense, is what happens with the recollection of brain is that he struggled with one part of it that's the flavour,
the smell or the touch of the of the of the mad man.
And what he was doing was trying to recreate the you can say that the reconnection of all
the different parts of the memory that involved vision and ideation and touch and so forth.
And finally then the whole thing comes back.
And I think we can I think we can sense that from our own experience that a small part of a picture can bring back the whole part of the picture.
And that's one of the essences of Gestalt.
It's in the in some studies in the brain, it's called a content addressable memory.
That is, every part of a pattern contains some representation of the whole pattern.
And so there's actually evidence from brain imaging of the,
the activation of different parts of the brain related to the smell and to the vision
and to the hearing related to the recollection of these multi-modal memories.
So that's maybe another form of neuroscience.
So it's time to get some input from all of you.
Can we just start the speakers without two or three children and figure out.