Very Evolved - Neuroscience and Nostalgia

An interesting post from a site - Very Evolved - that is new to me, but seems to have some good content. This is nice look at the neuroscience of emotionally tinged memory, what we think of as nostalgia.

Neuroscience and Nostalgia

by Patrick

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Ahh the good old days. The music, the sights, the sounds of a place that we can never journey back to. But why do these memories of times past feel so nostalgic? What makes these memories so different from remembering what I had for breakfast last Tuesday?

Put on the rose colored glasses and get ready to take a trip through our brain, as we examine the science of nostalgia.

What is nostalgia?

The scientific literature on nostalgia is quite thin, but there are a few fascinating studies that have attempted to pin down the essence of nostalgia, and the reasons that we feel that warm glow when recalling the past.

It’s not surprising to say nostalgia is all about memories. These recollections of our past are usually important events, people we care about, and places we’ve spent time at. What is perhaps a little surprising is that nostalgia is almost always associated with positive emotions – even when the trigger for recalling a nostalgic memory is something negative. In the study I’ve linked to the negative memory people reported was usually a bad situation that was eventually overcome – a bad memory tempered with a good outcome and association.

Smell and touch are also strong evokers of nostalgia and memories in general due to the processing of these stimuli first passing through the amygdala, the emotional seat of the brain.

Of course, music is also a strong trigger of nostalgia, and evidence of this is not only in scientific journals, but almost certainly in your mp3 collection.

What’s the point of feeling nostalgic?

The brain is an incredibly energy intensive organ, on average using more glucose than your muscles every day. So it goes without saying that the brain doesn’t usually do anything without a good reason. So what’s the advantage of feeling nostalgic?

The first study I referenced above, by Wildschut and colleagues, found that people who reported feeling nostalgic also experienced increased social bonding and increased positive self-regard. On the surface this doesn’t seem like a big deal. But with a brain that supports consciousness comes problems that our lesser primate cousins don’t have. Being self-aware is an issue way too big to dissect the neuroscience here, but the problems that come with it are things we’ve all experienced: depression, self doubt, lack of motivation. Not usually life threatening in this modern age, but potentially deadly to our Stone Age ancestors. If they gave up trying to make fire or struggling to find food because it was just too hard to bear, then you wouldn’t be reading this as we’d both be extinct.

In this context, nostalgia might be seen as a natural anti-depressant, something to hang onto to keep us motivated.

A note of caution here though: as I mentioned the neuroscience behind nostalgia is still in its infancy, so for now the best tools to examine it are psychological ones. Since psychology doesn’t preserve as well as a stone axe head, we can only infer what our ancestors were thinking. While this won’t always turn out to be right, it’s always fun to do.

Nostalgia is fluid and memories aren’t fixed

Our brain isn’t the hard drive of a computer, and our memories aren’t hard coded and unchangeable. Every time you recall a memory it may become subtly altered and associated with what ever it was that triggered that old memory. If this trigger happens repeatedly, then you’re adding new layer of interpretation that will be recalled automatically with the old memory next time it’s called up.

Read the whole article.

Tags: Psychology, Science, memory, brain, Very Evolved, Neuroscience and Nostalgia, positive emotions, neuroscience, nostalgia