Remembering Odors and Their Names

It is generally believed that odor memory is excellent, but its strengths and weaknesses compared with visual or auditory memory are not well appreciated. What odor perception does best, the basis for its reputation, is to recreate significant past episodes in a person's life. The French novelist Marcel Proust has provided the classic example, describing at the beginning of his masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past how the aroma and flavor of a morsel of petite madeleine soaked in a spoonful of tea brought back long-forgotten memories of his aunt's bedroom in the family's house at Combray: When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsub stantial, more persistent, more faith ful, the smell and taste of things . . . bear unfaltering, in the tiny and al most impalpable drop of their es sence, the vast structure of recollec tion.