In a famous scene from the French novel In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, the narrating character takes a bite out of a madeleine (a small, traditional French sponge cake) that he had previously dunked in a little tea.

Having done so, he begins to remember snatches of his childhood spent in the countryside.

"No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me," he says.

He goes on, saying, "And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray [...] my aunt Léonie used to give me."

The link between food or drink once tasted and the memory of places or things is something that all of us will be familiar with, and much has been made of it in literature and the arts.

But there is more to the way in which food jogs our memory. In fact, it seems that the signals that our guts send to our brains have been serving us well in terms of how we orient ourselves in the world that we inhabit, and they have been doing so for thousands of years.

This is what researchers from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles have found, at least, in a study recently published in Nature Communications.

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