Latest news with #MarcelProust
Scotsman
3 days ago
- Climate
- Scotsman
Susan Morrison: Why I'm getting into a lather over greasy bus windows
Brylcreemed windows is not a good look Well, now that Storm Floris has passed it looks like the temperat-ures have started to rise again, just in time for Storm Oasis to hit us. Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... We're heading into a perfect storm of bodies, heat and public transport, so can I make a plea now. Please, people, buy and use deodorant. The past few days on buses and trams have had me longing to bring back the sort of perfumed pomander seen in the stinky streets of 16th century London. Marcel Proust's memory was jogged by the taste of a wee cake, but the reek of fellow travellers has brutally triggered mine back to the 1970s. Back then, we had to be introduced to the concept of anti-social reekiness. Adverts appeared on television warning us about 'BO'. Body odour, for those too young to remember. It was a crime against humanity that even your best friend might not tell you about, and trust me, many were guilty. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad This was a time when Monday's school shirt still did duty on Wednesday. If the collar wasn't too grimy, you could get another day out of it. I have told this tale to young people of my acquaintance who live in a permanent fug of freshly laundered clothes, shower steam, body sprays and deodorants. They needed therapy. It doesn't take much time to have a quick squirt under the pits. If possible, avail yourself of a shower, and while you're at it, wash your hair. I've no idea quite why this has become a recent thing on the inside of the windows of Lothian buses, but seldom do I sit down now without a great greasy stain spread across the glass beside me. Of course, it might not be oily unwashed hair that's doing it. It could be tired rock-a-billy tribute lads smearing the windows by resting Brylcreemed heads against them. In which case, when Oasis meets the tourists, meets the heat, meets the fringe, those boys are just going to melt into a greasy puddle. If travelling by our busy buses and trams, don't commit the BO crime. Have a scoosh, have a wash and keep bus windows grease-free.
Time of India
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
The Taste Of Words, The Colours Of Sound
Can words be tasted on the tongue? Can sounds be seen as coloured shapes? Such questions are not hypothetical, nor are they psychedelic hallucinations. They refer to a well-documented neurological condition called synesthesia , in which the senses of taste, and sight, and sound, synthesise and intermingle to form a new sense or senses, which are a combination of two separate anatomical perceptions. Medical science does not generally deem synesthesia to be an aberration needing treatment or corrective therapy, but describes it as a consistent and spontaneous neural response to external stimuli by which two senses are simultaneously evoked. In the very rare case of lexical-gustatory synesthesia , sounds or words can stimulate the sense of taste, so that the auditory is imbued with flavour, the ear invokes the edible. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Access all TV channels anywhere, anytime Techno Mag Learn More Undo The common form of synesthesia is chromesthesia , in which sounds assume colour and can be visualised in chromatic arrangements of shapes and elaborate patterns. Far from being a disability, synesthesia of both kinds is often associated with increased memory, creativity, and linguistic skills. Was Marcel Proust an undiagnosed synesthete, who wrote his seven-volume, 4215-word, monumental novel, Remembrance of Things Past, considered one of the great landmarks of world literature, inspired by the recollected taste of a madeleine cake eaten in his childhood? None of Proust's several biographers has made such a connection, but recorded synesthetes include vastly different musicians and composers, like Duke Ellington, Franz Liszt, and Jean Sibelius; writers and poets like Vladimir Nabokov and Arthur Rimbaud; and painters such as Vincent Van Gogh. Such creative geniuses and many others similar to them, whom inattentive history has ignored or overlooked, have experienced the everyday commonplace world in ways that are unique. They could see sounds as colours, taste the texture of words. What Aldous Huxley called The Doors of Perception, the title of his 1954 book, in which he narrates his experiences under the influence of mescaline, are widened when consciousness is enhanced, by the use of hallucinogens as in Huxley's case, or through mental disciplines like meditation, or by naturally occurring neurological conditions, such as synesthesia. Could some of those singularly enabled individuals whom we refer to as mystics, or sages, or seers, people who literally see the world differently from us, be synesthetes, or be endowed with any other alternative form of sense perception? The Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment while sitting beneath the Bodhi tree, the fig-like fruit of which is rich in serotonin, a neurotransmitter that can alter the way we feel and think. Was the Buddha a synesthete? Consciousness derives from the messages that nerve cells called neurons pass to each other through infinitesimally tiny points of communication known as synapses. There are estimated to be between 86bn and 100bn neurons in a human brain. Each neuron can have hundreds or thousands of synapses, making for an assumed total of 15tn conduits of neuron messages. The minutest of changes in this infinitely complex neurological system can lead to unimaginable differences in the way that we perceive the world. It is this single thought of the limitlessness that lies within us that can provide all of us with a sixth sense: the sense of wonder. Authored by: Jug Suraiya Why Arjun Was Chosen: The Untold Secret of Bhagavad Gita Chapter 4, Verse 3
National Geographic
17-06-2025
- Health
- National Geographic
How smelling roses could help you make stronger memories
If hearing an old song or getting a whiff of freshly sharpened pencils instantly carries you back to high school, you're familiar with the link between your senses and memory. When a sensory experience spontaneously evokes an autobiographical memory, it's often called the Proust Effect, named for French author Marcel Proust who described how the experience of eating a madeleine instantly transported him back to childhood in his novel In Search of Lost Time. 'The senses are critical for memory because they're at the intersection between our environment, our experiences, and our memory system,' says Susanne Jaeggi, a professor of psychology, applied psychology, and music and co-director of the Brain Game Center for Mental Fitness and Well-Being at Northeastern University in Boston. But you don't have to wait for that random waft of pencil shavings to conjure your school days. By actively focusing on your senses during important moments, you may actually be able to improve your long-term memory. And even if you're not trying to remember a specific moment or experience, strengthening your senses will boost your memory overall. Here's how your primary senses influence memory—and what experts say you can do to hone them. The links between memory and the senses in your brain First, some background: On a basic physiological level, the parts of the brain that process smell, sight, sound, taste, touch, and memories are neurologically linked. When you're exposed to a particular sight, sound, or smell, your senses generate electrochemical activity—with brain cells firing, typically in the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for memory and learning, explains Andrew Budson, a professor of neurology at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and coauthor of the book Why We Forget and How to Remember Better. These signals are transmitted to the hippocampus, which then 'takes separate sights, sounds, smells, thoughts, and feelings and binds them together into something coherent,' he explains. Meanwhile, the brain's amygdala adds emotion to the experience, and another part of the hippocampus tags this information so it can be retrieved for years to come. 'One of the ways a memory can be tagged as important is if it had a strong sensation such as a strong smell or beautiful image associated with it,' says Budson. 'That tells the brain to hold onto the information for a long time.' When information is experienced across multiple senses—for example, if you see and smell an apple pie as it comes out of your grandmother's oven—it has a higher chance of being remembered, Jaeggi says, because 'you have different pathways for accessing it later.' Indeed, research has found that multisensory learning improves memory by creating what's known as a 'memory engram'—a physical trace or imprint of a memory in the brain—across different sensory areas in the brain. 'There's a myth that some people learn best with visual stimuli and others with auditory stimuli,' says Budson, who's also chief of cognitive behavioral neurology at the VA Boston Healthcare System. 'The truth is, we all learn best when we have a multisensory experience because we're literally storing that memory in multiple areas of the brain that are associated with those senses.' Different areas of the brain play a role in sensory processing and memory formation. There are two hemispheres in the brain, each of which contains four main lobes: • The frontal lobes help control thinking and short-term memory, as well as voluntary movements and emotion regulation; • the parietal lobes process and integrate sensory information, including taste, texture, and temperature; • the temporal lobes are involved in auditory processing and spatial and visual perception; • and the occipital lobes process and interpret visual information from your eyes. Sight has might As human beings, 'we are very visually oriented,' says Jonathan Schooler, a cognitive psychologist and professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara. 'You can recognize a smell but it's hard to recall a smell. It's easy to conjure an image in your mind. While people often think vision happens in the eyes, what you see is actually processed in the occipital lobes, the parietal lobes, and the temporal lobes of the brain. 'Vision is the largest sense in terms of brain real estate,' Budson explains. Not surprisingly, research has found that visual long-term memory 'has a massive storage capacity' for details. Visual memory also can help you remember people and places—and it's flexible. In a study in a 2023 issue of Current Biology, researchers demonstrated that visual memories are the result of neural codes that evolve over time so that people can use that information to guide their behavior in the future. For example, if you make a list of groceries to buy but forget to bring it to the store, the process of having written it down and reviewed it will help you remember what you need. TIP: Zoom in on the details. If you train your eyes and mind to pay better attention to visual stimuli, studies have shown it can improve accuracy and efficiency in recalling visual information. If you're gazing at a scene in nature or a painting in a gallery, home in on the colors and textures to help you remember it better. (Learn what makes a photo memorable.) Hearing provides a soundtrack Although it's unclear why, scientists have found that auditory memory—the ability to remember information that's presented orally—tends to be less robust than visual memory. But there are exceptions: A study in a 2021 issue of the journal Psychological Research found that musicians have specific advantages when it comes to remembering sequences of sound patterns. These include the variations in pitch associated with speech (based on intonations or inflections) as well as changes in frequency of other sounds. This makes sense because remembering sound variations is important to musicians. A similar principle applies to important moments in real life for non-musicians: You might remember what song was playing when you met the love of your life or the lyrics to a song you played nonstop in high school because they mattered to you. 'A lot of what we remember has to do with the [subjective] importance of the information we're processing—the fact that it is important or interesting to us,' Jaeggi says. TIP: Break down the sound into separate parts. Auditory training—training your mind to listen actively to sounds and make distinctions between them—has been shown to improve working memory, attention, and communication among adults with mild hearing loss. So if you hear a great song that you want to remember to add to Spotify later, try to pick out certain instruments or rhythms in the piece. Smell conjures emotions If the smell of fresh-cut grass or campfires reminds you of your childhood, you're in good company. In 2021, a study conducted in Japan found that exposure to particular scents—such as tatami (Japanese straw mat), osmanthus flower, baby powder, citrus, and incense—elicited vivid, autobiographical memories, causing participants to feel as though they were 'being brought back in time.' 'No other sensory system is linked to the neural hub of emotion, learning, and memory, the way smell is,' says Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist and adjunct assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and human behavior at the Brown University Medical School. The primary olfactory cortex resides where the amygdala and the hippocampus meet—"that's where the conscious perception of smell occurs,' Herz says, and it's the area that modulates learning and memory. A study in the journal Memory found that olfactory cues are more effective than visual cues at helping people recall memories from childhood. 'If you smell an odor, it's a great way to unlock a memory,' says Lila Davachi, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Columbia University in New York City. TIP: Stop and smell the roses, the freesias—and the rest of your surroundings. A 2023 review of the medical literature found that olfactory training (a.k.a., smell retraining) is associated with improved cognition and memory. 'Good olfactory function is important for healthy brain aging,' says Herz, author of Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship With Food. This is why Herz recommends engaging in smell training: Spend a few minutes every day smelling different things in your home such as spices, personal care products, perfumes, candles, or foods: 'Focus on what you're smelling and think about what it reminds you of,' she suggests. Taste the moment Believe it or not, there's something called gustatory working memory—the ability to remember a particular taste even after you're exposed to other tastes. With gustatory memory, taste information detected by your taste buds travels to the gustatory cortex, located within the cerebral cortex in the brain. There, it's processed and interpreted; then, the taste signals are transmitted to other brain regions, including the amygdala which plays a vital role in emotional responses and memory formation. Taste memory allows you to anticipate the taste of particular foods simply by looking at them, which helps you choose the foods you like and avoid those you don't. Keep in mind that your sense of taste doesn't work alone: 'When we talk about flavor, it comes from what's in our mouth but also [from] the volatile chemicals from what we're eating or drinking migrating up to the nose,' says Pamela Dalton, an olfactory scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. While it's widely claimed that between 75 and 95 percent of what we perceive to be taste actually comes from the sense of smell, a precise percentage has been hard to prove; even so, many researchers agree 'that olfaction plays a 'dominant' role in the tasting of food.' TIP: Eat a wide variety of foods—and describe them to lock in the experience. A study in a 2022 issue of Nature found that healthy adults who engaged in taste recall training became better at recognizing and recalling sweet, salty, sour, and bitter tastes they'd previously been exposed to. To improve your gustatory memory, treat yourself to a range of these different taste sensations. Focus on the flavors and the way the foods feel in your mouth—then describe them in words. While drinking wine, Budson recommends focusing on the various flavors and sensations on your tongue. Get a feel for things Most people don't think of memories related to the sense of touch—often called tactile memory—but research shows that people are remarkably adept at storing and recalling memories of how objects feel. 'Touch sensations are processed in the parietal lobes, close to the frontal lobes and next to the movement processing area,' Budson says. This allows you to integrate the experiences of touch and movement in ways that help orient you and navigate your surroundings—which is why you can hold a cup of coffee without looking at it or spilling it. TIP: Channel your inner preschooler and make time for sensory play. Research has found that engaging in tactile memory training can improve sustained attention and working memory. You can do this at home by running your fingers through bowls of water, rice, and dried beans and noting the differences in how they feel. You could also try making shapes with clay while focusing on the way it feels in your hands. If you pay attention to sensations that feel good or uncomfortable, it can help you make wise choices in the future. For example, if you take note of the discomfort you feel in a roughly textured shirt, it'll help you remember not to buy clothes in the same fabric in the future. Your tactile memory can also help you decide if a tote bag you've loaded up is going to hurt your hand or shoulder, based on previous experience. Ultimately, strengthening your senses and your memory is all about paying attention to the world around you, Schooler says. He recommends engaging in breath-focused meditation, using your breath to anchor your attention, then shifting your focus to whatever sights, smells, or sounds are arising. Herz agrees: 'The more attention you pay to anything—and attention is multisensory—the more it will reinforce whatever information you're encoding in your brain.' This article is part of Your Memory, Rewired, a National Geographic exploration into the fuzzy, fascinating frontiers of memory science—including advice on how to make your own memory more powerful. Learn more.
Vogue
03-06-2025
- Health
- Vogue
Ritz Club & Spa
Welcome to the second iteration of Vogue's global spa guide, an index of the 100 best spas in the world, built from the expertise of our global editors and trusted contributors. There is a lot to choose from in the world of wellness, and no matter how far you're planning to travel—from a subway ride to a transatlantic flight—we want to make sure it's worth the journey. Whatever your path, let us be your guide. Why go here? The Ritz Paris needs little introduction: It's one of the most iconic hotels in the world, with everyone from Coco Chanel to Marcel Proust to Kim Kardashian having walked through the famous revolving doors on the Place Vendôme and spent the night in one of its silk-canopied beds. (Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Ritz has also served as the backdrop for multiple Vogue shoots over the decades.) But the Ritz Club & Spa is its hidden secret: Tucked away on the rear side of the building, it's a subterranean wellness oasis that blends the hotel's, well, ritzy interior design with the latest in wellness and fitness. Photo: Jerome Galland / Courtesy of Sommerro Vestkantbadet What's the vibe? If you're arriving for the day, the Ritz Club & Spa has a dedicated entrance on Rue Cambon, where you'll descend a staircase to be greeted by a throng of staff standing in tweed jackets behind a glossy white spaceship of a reception desk. But if you're staying as a guest, you get the real luxury of padding down in the robes and slippers through a (somewhat labyrinthine) network of underground corridors. After a quick pit stop in the changing rooms, you'll step out into the spa's dramatic crown jewel: the expansive central pool area, with its sweeping double staircase, murals of Italianate gardens on the walls, and a ceiling frescoed with a heavenly blue sky gently streaked by clouds. The treatment rooms are things of beauty too: oversized watercolor-style flowers adorn the walls, while floral light fixtures on the ceilings fade to a soothing twinkle as your treatment begins. Once you're happily ensconced in your cabin, you'd never guess you were in the beating heart of one of the world's most hectic cities. Photo: Jerome Galland / Courtesy of Sommerro Vestkantbadet The history? There are few hotels with quite as illustrious a history as the Ritz Paris: Established in 1898 by the legendary hotelier César Ritz, it was the first hotel in the world to feature electricity on every floor and private bathrooms in every room. Things have come along since then, of course: The Ritz Club & Spa opened in the 1980s and was equally game-changing in the kinds of treatments it offered, bringing collagen-infused products and other cutting-edge techniques to Paris—and quickly becoming a favorite of the city's glitterati. (If my visit was anything to go by, the clientele here still has plenty of glitter.) What should you try? The Ritz is one of the very few Paris hotels to work with Biologique Recherche, the French beauty brand notorious for their strict requirements around collaborations—clearly, the team here is one they trust. (And now, the many fashion editors who make their seasonal pilgrimage to Biologique's palatial 'ambassade' on the Champs-Élysées for a facial need travel no further than the 1st arrondissement.) On my visit earlier this year, I went for the 90-minute 'ultimate hydration' facial—just the ticket after a long-haul flight—and was ushered into one of those gorgeously decorated cabins. Beginning with a classic cleanse and tone, I was then treated to a customized mask that had been adjusted to match my skin type with the specific goal of helping to drench and plump my parched visage. Emerging back into the relaxation area with a cup of freshly brewed herbal tea and catching a glimpse in one of the gilded mirrors, I was astonished to discover that my jet lag-induced eye bags had disappeared. Call it magic, or call it Biologique. Photo: Jerome Galland / Courtesy of Sommerro Vestkantbadet What else do we need to know? This being Paris—and the fact that many guests are likely in town for a red carpet event of some sort—the spa comes equipped with a truly opulent hairdressers and nail bar, the latter in collaboration with the Parisian polish brand Kure Bazaar, who created a unique shade of 'Ritzy' red especially for the hotel. And if you're a gym fanatic, the mirrored fitness studio is unusually expansive for a central Paris hotel, offering cutting-edge Matrix Fitness machines and over 40 classes a week. (Including dance sessions, should you be feeling particularly inspired by a visit to the ballet at the Opéra Garnier during your Parisian sojourn.) Who can go? Hotel guests can use the amenities free of charge without booking. Day access is also granted to those booking treatments over a certain price threshold, and locals can join the Ritz Club & Spa for the facilities and classes for a monthly fee. Photo: Jerome Galland / Courtesy of Sommerro Vestkantbadet Booking details for Ritz Club & Spa Address: 17 Pl. Vendôme, 75001 Paris, France Read more from Vogue's Global Spa Guide.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
A holiday remembrance of home
Members of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment place flags at the headstones of U.S. military personnel buried at Arlington National Cemetery, in preparation for Memorial Day on May 22, 2025 in Arlington, Virginia. (Photo by) Science informs us that our sense of smell can evoke vivid memories. The phenomenon is sometimes known as the 'Proust Effect,' for a scene from Marcel Proust's novel 'Remembrance of Things Past,' when a character's childhood memories come flooding back, triggered by the scent of a sweet cake called a madeleine. For me it's lilacs. Every Memorial Day of my childhood my mother would cut lilacs from the big bush near the back porch of our home in Grand Island. She would bunch them into bouquets and then send my sister and me in search of vases and mason jars to fill with water. On the trip to the cemetery in the back seat, my sister and I would hold tight to the lilacs and whatever else mom culled from our yard or that of a generous neighbor. Mom would manage my father's driving to keep the sloshing to a minimum. The car was thick with the unmistakable fragrance of lilacs, an aroma now permanently linked in my memory to Memorial Day. And, sadly, more. The lilac bush was large enough that anyone passing by on the sidewalk enjoyed the scent. Rich Gillham knew the smell. He was two grades ahead of me in school and six blocks to the north of me on Kimball Street, but a childhood friend nonetheless, the way neighborhood friends know each other. He would pedal by on his bicycle and then, as a teen he would zoom past on his motorcycle — sometimes stopping because he had me on the back hitching a ride home from football practice. There was an uncluttered ease to Rich, a confidence that this 15-year-old, saddled with a high school sophomore's lack of self-assurance and no driver's license, admired. My parents didn't want me riding on a motorcycle, but they knew Rich and his parents, Gerald and Ursula, the way neighborhood parents know each other. Rich never came by as an adult. He was killed in a place called Dinh Tuong Province, thousands of miles from Kimball Street and the smell of lilacs. He was 20. I'm not sure I'll remember Rich more this Memorial Day than I do any other day. With war now a modern constant and young men and women from their own streets and neighborhoods in places we call harm's way, he is more on my mind. I paid my respects to Rich and others when the traveling wall made it to our hometown, where I was overcome with many emotions, not the least of which was the rushing back of a shared and gentle childhood. War being what it is, we're never far from paying respects and decorating graves and realizing the true and somber meaning of Memorial Day. Vietnam was my generation's war. Rich was my neighbor and friend who died there, whose life and death touched many, especially those of us from Kimball Street. We played as kids. Our families shared dinners. Our parents laughed over beers. In high school, Rich played football his senior year, never getting in a game, but sticking it out nonetheless. And he was always willing to throw me on the back of his little two-wheeler and take me home. My best last memory of Rich was of him astride his new, powerful Triumph motorcycle, so loud a conversation next to it was impossible. A group of us were parked at Nifty's Drive-In on South Locust Street when we heard him coming on the Triumph, a growling, snarling monster in faded copper. We were taken with the clamor and power … and Rich, nonchalant and indifferent to the stares from the curious, the impressed and the disgusted. He turned it off for a few minutes for a little back and forth chatter, then stomped the Triumph a few times to bring it back to life. He sped off in a cloud of youth and noise. We made a point to see how far he would get before we could no longer hear him. It was long after he drove out of sight, much to our delight and admiration. Delight and admiration. That's how I remember my neighbor, the first casualty of war from my childhood. Come to think of it, delight and admiration could fit millions of memories on Memorial Day. And maybe throw in the scent of lilacs, too. (Editor's Note: This commentary was originally published in the Grand Island Independent on May 29, 2011, and is being republished with permission. It has been updated for clarity and to reflect the passage of time.)
