Memory Trigger

The psychological concept of "association" connects sensations and memories, such as the scent of a perfume to its name or where you smelled it before. This trope is cataloguing when such remembering occurs in stories.

Thankfully, due to The Law of Conservation of Detail, if it's pointed out that a character points out that they remember something due to something else, the memory is likely important and not irrelevant to the story being told, so this is unlikely to be stuffed with insignificant examples.

A Sub-Trope is A Place Holds Memories, where the act of visiting a place makes someone remember things. Another Sub-Trope is Regained Memories Sequence, for amnesia victims, since those memories don't just come bursting out of nowhere, and that subtrope might be caused by a Trigger Phrase, which is a conditioned trigger for some action in general.

This usually overlaps with a Flashback to display the recalled memory to the audience, instead of just summarizing the memory in a quick phase, such as "Alice remembered her first meeting with Bob".

Comfort Food explicitly says that it can trigger memories, and Repressed Memories are usually uncovered due to a trigger.

Actual physically retrieving memories by the use of Memory Jars or getting a Transferable Memory aren't this trope, since in those cases, it's more the memory is being given to a character, instead of being remembered due to a sensation.

Compare "Eureka!" Moment, which is an inspiration trigger, instead of a memory trigger. Super-Trope to Memory-Restoring Melody.

Someone to Remember Him By is not the Justified Trope version of this by making a deliberate trigger unless the mother is strangely forgetful and has to be reminded by seeing their child.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Cowboy Bebop: The Ax-Crazy Pierrot le Fou's Troubled Backstory Flashback starts with a zoom in on his eye since the trigger for his traumatic memories involves seeing anyone with heterochromatic eyes, causing him to involuntarily Flash Back to the similar-looking cat present during the painful experiments that empowered him and drove him mad.
• Food Wars!: Megumi Tadokoro specializes in Comfort Food. Her cooking has a relaxing quality that evokes childhood memories and the simple comforts of home.
• Macross Frontier: Ranka Lee has Repressed Memories due to the trauma of being the Sole Survivor (or so everyone thought) of a Vajra attack when she was five. Seeing the Vajra again begins bringing these memories to the surface.
• Gunslinger Girl: The "Conditioning" to turn the titular girls into assassins represses their memories. Henrietta is on a mission when she sees a man in a ski mask, which triggers the memories of her past. She flies into a fit of rage, accidentally shoots her handler, and this ultimately results in her death.
• School-Live!: Yuki represses the memories of zombies. For example, in the anime, she forgot what an instant camera is despite taking a photo a few days prior because she is in denial over her teacher's death. In chapter 5, Yuki triggers the memories of Megu-nee twice. The first time Kurumi reminded her of something Megu-nee told her once, but Yuki had trouble remembering it clearly. The second time she triggers herself by saying something that causes a severe headache. It's revealed to us that Megu-nee has been Dead All Along and what triggered Yuki was that she said something similar during Megu-nee's death.

Fan Works

• Dungeon Keeper Ami: After Ami raids Malleus's mind for information and had to relive snippets from that Evil Overlord's centuries-long life to get the information she wanted, Ami gets reminders of what she experienced while in his head at relevant times and she doesn't like how her body's copying his reactions, like when looking at his Sex Slaves, before she frees them.
• Played for Drama in Eleutherophobia: How I Live Now. When Tom smells kandrona in the tunnels leading to the ruins of the Yeerk Pool, it brings back awful memories of all the times his Yeerks forced him to swallow it.
• Not the intended use (Zantetsuken Reverse): Soma's hunger and ability to become an Extreme Omnivore, plus a memory about his mother's teachings, led him to decide to eat rotten food:
  Soma looked at the former food, and remembered what his mother had always told him about wasting food.
• Viper, Spider, Phoenix: "Joan Watson" Repressed Memories of being O-Ren Ishii as just dreams or deja vu, until they were reawakened after seeing Moriarty (AKA, the Bride).
• Witches Wizards Shadows and Souls: In order to keep the nature of their Shadow Magic a secret, Bakura erases the memories of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, but warns the others that if they see Shadow Magic performed again they will remember everything. It turns out to be a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy when circumstances force Bakura to summon Diabound in front of them, triggering the memories of the last time they saw the monster.

Film — Animated

• In Anastasia, Dowager Empress Marie has a Signature Scent of peppermint oil because she dabs it on her opera gloves. The scent triggers a memory in Easy Amnesia orphan Anya of spilling peppermint oil on the palace carpet. No matter how much servants scrubbed that spot, it continued to smell of peppermint. This statement convinces Empress Marie that Anya is, in fact, her long-lost granddaughter Princess Anastasia.

Film — Live-Action

• In The Parent Trap (1961), Susan (posing as Sharon) smells her grandfather and tries to make his scent a Signature Scent to remember him with:
  Charles: What are you doing?
  Susan: Making a memory.
  Charles: Making a memory?
  Susan: All my life, when I'm quite grown-up I will always remember my grandfather and how he smelled of tobacco and peppermint.
  Charles: Tobacco and peppermint. Well, I'll tell you what. I take the peppermint for my indigestion and as for the tobacco... to make your grandmother mad.
• Used in several Saw films to set up flashbacks, usually involving the characters that are remembering.
  • The main trials of Saw IV, Saw VI and Saw 3D have numerous clues left to the protagonists involved regarding past events in their life, either to make them figure where to continue with the game (e.g. one of the letter messages Rigg reads in Saw IV) or to simply remind them of what they did to be tested (the written text on William's skin under the bombs strapped to him in Saw VI, the environmental props and text Bobby comes across in Saw 3D).
  • Specific to Saw VI:
    • Hoffman telling Jill that he'll no longer see her once he's finished with all the tasks listed in the envelopes Jill left him makes the latter reminisce of the time John tried to show her that his "method of rehabilitation" works by showing Amanda (who had recently come out from her test back in the first movie) to her.
    • Hoffman himself gets a Memory Trigger when he enters the surveillance room for William's game and finds a blackmail letter he had sent to Amanda back in Saw III, with the ensuing flashback montage revealing the sequence when Hoffman wrote it and Amanda read it using footage between Saw III and IV, with some additional scenes establishing the circumstances. Said letter was left by Jill (who had previously received the letter from Pamela, and was infuriated when she discovered that Hoffman was the one who wrote it) in the surveillance room as part of her sneak attack on him.

Literature

• In the second book of the Aubrey-Maturin series, Stephen makes the mistake of purchasing a distinctive bottle of perfume for Diana, which makes it her Signature Scent since it never fails to remind him of her. Even when it shows up on his best friend.
• In Search Of Lost Time by Marcel Proust: In Swann's Way, the Narrator describes how, once, after eating a madeleine, he regained the memories of his childhood. To this day, in French, madeleine de Proust refers to something reminding someone from earlier times.

Live-Action TV

• An episode of Dharma & Greg revolves around Greg's lack of childhood memories, which Dharma encourages him to try to cure by going to his childhood home to find familiar scents, while Dharma's dad Larry finds an old bottle of Hai Karate cologne which conveniently helps him remember whatever he's trying to recall whenever he sniffs it.
• Highlander: In every episode, something triggers Duncan's memory of something, which leads to the every episode flashback scene(s) which is germane to the rest of the episode.
• Lost: One of the episodes has many scenes where characters accidentally, through various means, come to remember things about their life they never were aware of. For example, two characters meet in a hallway, start a conversation, they realize they had met before and unlock shared memories that were previously unavailable for them.
• Psych utilizes this on a regular basis: Shawn recognizes a clue, flashes back to a relevant conversation/incident, and uses it to corner the culprit.
• At the beginning of the TV Movie "Shattering The Silence", the sight of her father giving her newborn daughter a stuffed horse—"Family tradition! All my little girls get horsies!"—is enough to trigger a woman's Repressed Memories of she and her sister being sexually abused by him, which he would always disguise as a game—"Let's play Ride The Horsey!". This, coupled with seeing her niece's own upset reaction to this is enough to make her realize that he's now abusing her.
• The Star Trek: The Original Series episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" has Captain Kirk check in on Federation researcher Roger Korby on planet Exo 3. Korby has discovered a device that can make a lifelike android duplicate of anyone and insists on using it on Kirk. This leads to a fierce moral argument that triggers a memory in the alien machine tender Ruk. Ruk recalls that the same argument led to a Robot War with their creators, which made "the Old Ones" extinct. Ruk is also a robot, as is Roger Korby, and gets destroyed in the conflict.
• An early episode of Young Sheldon centered around George trying to ask Meemaw for her brisket recipe, which she gleefully refuses to tell him. At one point, Missy plays with Sheldon's train set in front of him, causing him to recall a time when he was a baby and Meemaw told him the recipe.

Music

• The song "Lady Writer" by Dire Straits: Seeing the titular person on the TV reminds the singer about someone:
  Lady writer on the TV
  Talking about the Virgin Mary
  Reminded me of you
  Expectation left to come up to, yeah
  Lady writer on the TV
  Yeah, she had another quality
  The way you used to look
  And I know you never read a book
  Just the way that her hair fell down around her face
  And I remember my fall from grace
• The song "Past Life" by Tame Impala:
  I was picking up a suit from the dry cleaners
  Which is standard for me, Thursday, 12:30
  I've got a pretty solid routine these days
  I don't know, it just works for me
  Anyway, I was leaving, I was getting in my car
  And I went to adjust the rear-view mirror
  But, in its reflection, just for a second
  I saw a figure, started to trigger
  Memories flooded back, stopped me in my tracks
  Who was that? It was my lover
  A lover from a past life

Video Games

• Fire Emblem: Awakening: A conversation about a Comfort Food is the trigger: If Gaius is Cynthia's father and speaks to the Alternate Cynthia in the DLC Future Past map, Alternate Cynthia will politely refuse the sweets he offers her... but only because she wants to eat said candy after the fight is over, since she remembers how her now dead actual father used to give her candy as a prize for doing good things.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Link is an Amnesiac Hero as a side effect of spending a century in the Shrine of Resurrection. He can remember more about Princess Zelda and the Champions by seeing objects and places he associates with memories of them. For example, having Revali's Landing pointed out to him gets him to remember a meeting he had with Revali there while seeing Riju wearing the Thunder Helm gets him to remember Urbosa when the helm belonged to her.
• Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor: The Wraith suffers from Ghost Amnesia, so in order to regain his memories, Talion has to travel about Mordor, finding relics from his past in the form of metal-crafting tools. Every time Talion touches one of these tools, his body seizes up as the memories return to the Wraith, reminding him that he was Celebrimbor, the Ultimate Blacksmith of the High Elves, responsible for forging the Rings of Power, and who lead a revolution against Sauron before being imprisoned, tortured and killed for daring to steal the One Ring and use it against the Dark Lord.
• Nancy Drew: The Haunted Carousel: Nancy has to order the Comfort Food hot fudge Fundae and grab the special spoon in order to rekindle Joy's Repressed Memories.

Visual Novels

• The Ace Attorney series:
  • Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth: In Case 4 of the second game, Kay Faraday recovers from her amnesiac state when Edgeworth bestows her father's Promise Notebook to her.
  • The Great Ace Attorney: In the second game's fourth case, "Twisted Karma and His Last Bow", Daley Vigil cannot remember the true reason why he left his job at Barclay Prison. Presenting him with the documents detailing why he was sacked results in him going light-headed and recounting this deep, dark mystery.

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