Madeleine Moment
The instance one is bombarded by a flood of memories and experiences made conscious by the unexpected stimuli of a connected object or place — as in the madeleine that sparked Proust's memories of his childhood in "In Search of Lost Time."
Origin
Named for a passage in Marcel Proust's Swann's Way (1913), the opening volume of In Search of Lost Time, in which the narrator dips a madeleine into linden-flower tea and is flooded with a complete, vivid childhood memory. Proust used the French phrase mémoire involontaire (involuntary memory) to name the phenomenon. Cognitive psychologists did not begin systematic study of involuntary autobiographical memories until the 1980s — roughly seventy years after Proust had described them with literary precision.