Ruth Reichl + Paul Rozin

The Madeleine Syndrome

Monday April 23, 2012 @ 7:00 PM
Price: $25.00
Member Price: $22.50

Ticket Includes:

6:15 p.m.
Mnemonic Art Tour in the galleries

6:45 p.m.
Karma Chain on the spiral staircase

7:00 p.m.
Program in the theater

8:30 p.m.
Book signing

Sold Out

Sold Out? Even if a program is sold out, Chairman's Circle members

($1,000 and higher) have the privilege of purchasing house

seats as they become available. Enquire at the Box Office: 212.620.5000 ext. 344

If you are interested in being on the stand-by list, you must arrive at the museum two (2) hours before the start of the program to place your name on the stand-by list.  If there are tickets available at the start of the program the Front Desk staff will sell them to those on the stand-by list at the time, in the order the names were received. 

“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. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me.” – Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past. Volume 1: Swann's Way: Within a Budding Grove. (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

Ruth Reichl is a writer and editor who was the Editor in Chief of Gourmet Magazine for ten years until its closing in 2009. Before that she was the restaurant critic of The New York Times, (1993-1999), and both the restaurant critic and food editor of the Los Angeles Times (1984-1993). As co-owner and cook of the collective restaurant The Swallow from 1974 to 1977, she played a part in the culinary revolution that took place in Berkeley, California.

Paul Rozin is Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a renowned authority on human and animal behavior related to taste and smell. His research interests include: attitudes to chocolate, meat and water; magical thinking; cultural evolution; disgust; morality; psychology of music; positive psychology; negativity dominance; and the idea of purity.

Mnemonic Art Tour 
Take advantage of a short tour of some paintings in the collection that function as mnemonic devices. The iconography in these paintings serve to reference specific passages in the sutras. That is why most of these works were not meant to be revealed to those who were not already initiates. The tour will include two types of paintings: narratives such as the life of the Buddha, and mandalas which are complex two-dimensional diagrams of one’s multi-dimensional state of mind.

Karma Chain
As a prelude to the staged program, we are planning to stage a simple game of ‘telephone’ prior to the session to demonstrate the fallibility of oral transmission and the nature of short-term memory. Each ticket holder will stand on one of the steps of the 108-stepped spiral staircase of the Museum. The guest speaker stands at the base, whispers a short phrase they have prepared to the visitor on the first step, and the phrase would spiral up through the line until it reaches the ear of the scientist. The conversationalists will only reveal the original phrase and the result phrase when on stage in the theater, thus starting the conversation about memory.