The Proust pill
Back in 1998, I decided to write a novel about a memory pill — a drug that would work like Proust’s madeleine. While I was busy writing, the science caught up with fiction.
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A FEW MONTHS AGO, researchers at West Virginia University stumbled across a gene in the mouse brain that appears to erase long-term memories. When scientists switched off the gene, the mice developed super-charged memory, able to recall the solution to a maze they’d seen six weeks before, an eternity in mouse time. The discovery is only the most recent in a flurry of breakthroughs that promise a new class of drugs that might help us retain newly learned information and stave off diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Such drugs have been in development for some time, and it was in reading about them, way back in 1998, that I was first emboldened to create my own memory pill, one that could restore lost memories and the powerful emotions connected to them. A drug, in other words, that would work like Proust’s madeleine. One day the author dunked his cookie into tea, a smell from his childhood rose up, and he fell into a fugue state, the nursery-room scenes that would fill “Remembrance of Things Past” arrayed before him in magnificent detail.
What if powers of memory like that were always available to you? What would happen if, say, a memory of your fifth-grade classroom could become as vivid as the chair you’re sitting in right now? What if you could experience any lost pleasure-a long-ago tryst, say-over and over again? I set out to create a drug that would do all that, cooking it up in the only way I knew how: I wrote a novel about it.
My interest in creating such a pill was admittedly more personal than scientific. When I was in my teens and 20s, I used to be able to experience something like Proust’s madeleine moment. I could revisit scenes in vivid Technicolor: the cicadas buzzing through the burnt summer lawns of my childhood in Maryland; the sweaty nickel in my hand as I waited for the ice cream truck; the drop of blood that appeared on my best friend’s finger, like a magic ruby, after she pricked herself with a needle to show her undying allegiance to me.
But by my 30s, those memories had started to fade. What I was left with was a memory of what my memory used to be like, a poignant awareness of my own deficit. I first noticed this about eight years ago: One day, rooting through a drawer in mymom’s house, I came across a photo of myself as a girl. In the photo, I’m about 5 years old, decked out in a swami robe, my eyes hidden behind enormous Jackie O sunglasses. But I could summon no memory of that day, no explanation, though I had the conviction that I used to know what that picture was all about, that there was some important story connected with it. It felt like I had lost a key that unlocked some inner door. I could still press my ear to it, could still run my hand against its grain and examine its hinges, but I would never get through that door again.
My interest in creating such a pill was admittedly more personal than scientific. When I was in my teens and 20s, I used to be able to experience something like Proust’s madeleine moment. I could revisit scenes in vivid Technicolor: the cicadas buzzing through the burnt summer lawns of my childhood in Maryland; the sweaty nickel in my hand as I waited for the ice cream truck; the drop of blood that appeared on my best friend’s finger, like a magic ruby, after she pricked herself with a needle to show her undying allegiance to me.
But by my 30s, those memories had started to fade. What I was left with was a memory of what my memory used to be like, a poignant awareness of my own deficit. I first noticed this about eight years ago: One day, rooting through a drawer in my mom’s house, I came across a photo of myself as a girl. In the photo, I’m about 5 years old, decked out in a swami robe, my eyes hidden behind enormous Jackie O sunglasses. But I could summon no memory of that day, no explanation, though I had the conviction that I used to know what that picture was all about, that there was some important story connected with it. It felt like I had lost a key that unlocked some inner door. I could still press my ear to it, could still run my hand against its grain and examine its hinges, but I would never get through that door again.
And so I began my novel about memory. I knew at the time that several companies, including one appropriately called Memory Pharmaceuticals, were working to develop real treatments for memory loss, but I didn’t pay them much mind. My drug would be different. It would be recreational-Proust’s madeleine reduced to tiny chemical specks. My drug would launch the user into the best moments of his life, allowing him to savor long ago joys, allowing him to meet his boyhood self.
I worked on the novel in between other projects. I got stuck. I put it down. I was accustomed to writing fiction, but this premise pushed me toward science fiction, unfamiliar territory. I wrote in circles. I deleted entire chapters. For several years, I swore I would give up the book. But the idea of that imaginary drug continued to tug at me. And then, three years ago, I suddenly understood how to make the book work.
In that revision, I named the pill Mem, because I liked the way that word seemed to boil memory down to its essence. Mem sounded short, sharp, fast, fun, addictive.
We tend to think of recreational drugs as the toys of the young, but a memory drug is of course an elixir for the regrets of middle age. I imagined a professor stumbling into his 40s, a man whose marriage is breaking up, and who has fallen short of his ambitions. He uses the drug to cheat on his wife-with a younger version of herself. He gorges himself on long-ago moments when he believed he was on the verge of glory. He uses his past as pornography.
To my surprise, in the course of writing the novel, I saw just how dangerous this drug might be. The past is potently intoxicating, nd if we could ever taste it purely, undiluted by forgetfulness, we would, I came to believe, disappear into ourselves.
And that wasn’t the only surprise I experienced in the course of writing. While I was busy mapping out my plot, scientists were busy mapping out the mental switches that control the encoding of memories. And drug companies were developing pills to encourage old neurons to perform like young ones. Memory Pharmaceuticals, for instance, is currently testing a drug that could enhance our ability to retain information. In a recent trial, volunteers took the pills for 13 days and showed a significant improvement in their recall of words and pictures.
Such pills won’t send you rocketing back to prom night, 1982. But like the chemical I imagined, they do promise to take away the fog of forgetting. The implications of this remain to be seen: If we’re able to reel off every item on a shopping list from two weeks ago, will we find that the present moment becomes dimmer and the future less compelling? Perhaps not. But there’s another parallel between my drug, Mem, and the one being developed by Memory Pharmaceuticals. They’ve given their pill an eerily similar name: Mem 3454.
I have to admit, theirs sounds cooler than mine.
Pagan Kennedy is the author of “Confessions of a Memory Eater” and seven other books.