Musing from his sickbed, Marcel Proust in his 1913 semi-autographical novel Remembrances of Things Past (A` la recherche du temps perdu) famously described the vivid retrieval of a long-lost memory evoked by the smell and taste of a tea-soaked madeleine cake. His childhood memory of cherished Sunday mornings in the country, his aunt Le´onie, and now the rush of memory itself was an exquisite pleasure, he wrote. “And all from my cup of tea.” The Proust effect, as it has come to be called, refers to the phenomenon most of us have experienced, in which sensory cues instantly take us back to a long-ago memory.1

Modern science has since established that taste and smell cues are perhaps the strongest stimuli for retrieving old memories.