In Search of Lost Spaces: Olfactory-Triggered Memory as Mental Teletransportation

Clare Batty (University of Kentucky)

In the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust famously describes a scene in which his narrator, Marcel, tastes a tea-soaked madeleine. This act uncovers seemingly long-lost memories of his childhood. Marcel’s experience in this scene has become the namesake for what is now commonly called the Proust phenomenon: vivid autobiographical memory triggered by sensory cues, most notably taste and smell. Olfactory-triggered autobiographical memories have attracted significant scientific interest but remain virtually absent from the philosophical literature on memory. This is surprising, given how striking and widely reported they are. In this paper, I offer an account of olfactory-triggered memories that, by staying faithful to their phenomenology, reveals an important feature overlooked by scientific definitions—their distinctive spatial character. Reframing the “mental time travel” model of episodic memory, I propose that Proustian memories are best conceived as instances of mental teletransportation: experiences in which one is brought back to a location rather than a point in time.