The Proust effect: what a French novelist accidentally figured out about memory 100 years before neuroscience caught up
Before Science Had a Word For It: The Proust Effect
There's a version of my nani's house that I can walk through with my eyes closed, and it doesn't start with a picture. It starts with a smell.
Her house was a typical Konkani wada — an open aangan in the middle, banana, jamun and moringa and neem trees growing right up against the walls, a sweet tamarind tree somewhere near the back that none of us could ever agree was actually sweet. Inside, wooden shelves in the kitchen holding steel and aluminium vessels that had been there longer than I had. Every morning, incense lit somewhere in the house before anyone had properly woken up. My nani in her cotton saree, moving through all of it like she'd done it ten thousand times, because she had.
Mornings there were the closest thing to pure peace I've experienced. Afternoons were quieter still — everyone would disappear for a nap, and my cousins and I would set up a carrom board in whatever patch of shade we could find and play until someone's mother woke up and called us in for tea.
I didn't think about any of this consciously for years. And then I started building my own home.
The thing I didn't know I was doing
I wasn't trying to recreate her house. I was just furnishing rooms, the way anyone does — figuring out what went where, what the mornings would feel like once the boxes were gone. And somewhere in that process, I noticed I kept reaching for the same thing before I'd even unpacked half the furniture: incense, lit in the morning, before I'd had coffee, before I'd really thought about why.
It wasn't a decision. It was closer to a craving I hadn't named yet. It took me a while to realize what I was actually doing — I was trying to rebuild a feeling, and the fastest route back to it wasn't a photo of the wada or a story about it. It was a smell.
That's when I went looking for why smell works on us like this. Turns out, someone had already figured it out — over a century ago, and not in a lab.
A cookie, a cup of tea, and a novel that ran for 4,000 pages
In 1913, the French novelist Marcel Proust published the first volume of what would become a seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time. Early in the book, the narrator dips a small shell-shaped cake — a madeleine — into a cup of tea, and is hit, without warning, by a flood of childhood memory. Not a memory he was trying to recall. One that simply arrived, whole, the second the taste and smell reached him.
Proust spent the rest of the novel — thousands of pages of it — trying to understand why that one small sensory moment could unlock more of his past than years of deliberate remembering ever had. He didn't have the neuroscience to explain it. He just had the observation, and he trusted it enough to build a masterwork around it.
Psychologists now call this the Proust effect: the phenomenon where a smell — more than a sound, more than a photograph — triggers a sudden, involuntary memory, often decades old, often more emotionally vivid than a memory you reached for on purpose.
What Proust couldn't have known
Here's the part that took science about a hundred years to catch up on. Every other sense you have — sight, sound, touch — routes through a part of the brain called the thalamus before it reaches anywhere that processes emotion or memory. It's a relay station. Smell skips it entirely.
Your olfactory bulb sits remarkably close to two structures buried deep in the brain: the amygdala, which handles emotion, and the hippocampus, which handles memory formation. Smell has almost a direct line to both. That's the actual, physical reason a smell can drop you back into a moment before you've consciously registered what you're even smelling — while a photo of the same place just makes you think, calmly, "oh, that's the old house."
It's not nostalgia working faster. It's neuroanatomy. Proust noticed the effect. Neuroscience eventually found the wiring behind it.
Why we built Nani ka Ghar around this
We didn't set out to make a candle that smells like a specific house. We set out to make one that does what that madeleine did for Proust — skip the explaining, skip the photograph, and go straight to the feeling.
Nani ka Ghar is built on warm milk, clean cotton, morning air, and old sandalwood — not because those are pleasant notes on paper, but because that combination is the closest we could get to a waada in the morning, incense just lit, before anyone's properly awake. If it works the way it's supposed to, you won't need to know any of that background to feel it. You'll just recognize it, the way I recognized what I was doing the moment I lit incense in my own unfinished home, years before I ever thought to ask why.
Nani ka Ghar is part of Neev's Summer Edit — available as a tin or tealight set. [Shop the collection →]