(static and music going in and out)
- I was scrolling back in time recently
past the billions of little moments I've lived,
all these photos that I've captured over the years,
and I stumbled upon a region of my photo bank
that I hadn't really ever looked at before.
It was right here.
We had just gotten married
and we walked from our little apartment
up to the mountain near our house.
How are you doing, Is?
- Good.
- We had no idea if we could actually get to the top
or how long it would take, but we hiked.
We camped at the top and we watched the sun
fall over the mountain,
and I just love looking at these photos.
A few weeks later, Is surprised me with a road trip
to San Diego and then into Tijuana.
- Crossing the border to Tijuana.
- I had completely forgotten about this experience.
We spent so many hours on the beach playing Frisbee,
we ate tacos, we visited old friends.
There was this political rally that we wandered into.
Man, I just, I don't even remember that,
and then suddenly I do.
That was, quote, "One of the happiest days of my life."
Okay.
When I look at these photos, at these videos,
something happens in my brain.
It's like I'm mourning something and yet celebrating it too.
I've been thinking about this feeling for a while
and I've been talking to my friend Nathaniel Drew,
who also is very interested in investigating this.
- So hold on, do you want to,
I feel like I'm overthinking this
but I want you to be happy with the framing that I've got,
at least frame rate.
I'm shooting in 24.
- As video nerds, dude, we can't help ourselves
to talk about composition and frame rate right at the top.
But yeah, no, I think we're on the same page.
- My theory on nostalgia
is that nostalgia is kind of like fire, okay?
And it can be kind of like playing with fire.
So fire can, it can warm you up,
but you, I feel like you can get lost in it too,
staring too long at the fire or getting too close,
you can get burned.
- As we talked, we sort of laid out our theories
of what's going on here, and then we decided
how we could investigate this further
by experimenting on ourselves.
What would happen to my brain
if I started listening to music from 2005
and watching old home videos and smelling old smells
and just sparking that feeling every day?
- I may just make a guess here.
I do wonder if this will lead to you
kind of returning to your roots, whatever that means.
- So Nathaniel and I set out on separate journeys,
both of us trying to spark a certain type of nostalgia
in our own way.
Nathaniel's goal was to go back in time
and start to experience the world in a more analog way
without social media and phones and et cetera.
And for me, the journey was going to be getting out
old journals, old books, old smells, old music,
and cultivating a practice where every day,
I expose myself to this old stuff
and see what that does to my brain.
I dived into the neuroscience
and looked at the studies that have been done
on what happens to the brain.
But I also looked at my own personal experience
and I learned a lot, and that's what I want to share
with you today.
So I have a theory on how all of us experience life.
It looks like this.
Okay, so you were born here.
My theory is that as you grow up,
you start experiencing the world like this.
This little ring represents the stuff
that you're thinking about, worrying about, excited about.
This ring stretches maybe a few days back
and forward in time, maybe a week or two,
but not much more than that.
If you were living totally in the present moment,
it would look something like this.
If you were constantly thinking about everything,
everything that has happened over the course
of your entire year or your life,
the ring would look a lot more like this.
But I believe most people's conscious experience
looks like this, thinking about the good
and stressful things that happened yesterday at work
or worrying about the good and stressful things
that are coming up tomorrow or maybe next week.
We have a productive day at work,
and then you have a really good conversation
with your sister on the phone one evening,
and then you also get in a fight with your partner,
and I believe that most of us use the information
in this ring to construct the current story of ourselves.
In other words, we use this information to decide
what we think and feel about ourselves, who we think we are.
But as we move forward, these events will fade
and new events will come into the ring
and help us construct a new story
of who we think we are, what we feel about ourselves.
So you're moving along, and then one night,
something really good happens.
You go out with friends, you dance, you have so much fun.
It's the first week of October
and the air is turning cool and crisp.
It smells like fall, it smells like the city,
it smells like liquor, like perfume, like freedom.
You have this one conversation that is so exciting,
so inspiring.
You feel connected to this place, to these people.
And then it's over, and for a few days,
you consciously remember that night,
you fondly think about it.
But a week later, you kind of have no reason
to think about it anymore.
That night sort of starts to fade,
those conversations, that feeling, those smells.
Those memories are still stored away
but your conscious mind has new stuff
to put its spotlight on.
That night, as a memory, as an experience,
gets filed away in some dusty file cabinet somewhere
in the depths of your long-term memory.
And then suddenly, it's a time in your life
that looks so different from that great night
you had with friends.
You haven't seen friends in a long time, you're lonely.
You're wondering if you've even ever had friends.
You're wondering if you're even likable.
You're going off the information that's available to you,
the stuff that's in this ring,
which, on both sides, is full of dull, quiet loneliness.
But what if somehow you could retrieve that night
from the old dusty file cabinet in your long-term memory?
You dust it off.
You maybe edit it a little bit
so that it just includes the best parts,
and then you bring it forth and put it in the ring.
Something happens to your brain when you do this.
Suddenly you have more information to add
to your story about yourself.
This information is old information, but it feels new
because you haven't thought about it in a really long time
and it challenges your current story,
the story about you being lonely and unlikable.
And in this moment, you feel two things really strongly.
You feel a literal physical warmness,
a wonder, a comfort, a happiness in belonging.
But the other feeling you get is a yearning
to be back in that moment
and an acknowledgement that it will never happen again.
These two feelings are the ingredients
for the potent experience of nostalgia.
So when neuroscientists look at the brain
of people who are experiencing nostalgia,
they see something pretty interesting.
They see these two spots that fire at once
and sort of start talking to each other,
a very unique process in the brain.
This one is the mind recalling the memory.
It's technically called chronological remoteness,
let's just call it memory.
And one is your emotional network,
the stuff that makes you feel happy or sad.
And during nostalgia specifically,
it's firing in the reward centers.
The good, the positive, yes, brain likes this.
These two fire together and connect with each other.
It's a strange neural dance
between these two unlikely partners
of memory and emotional reward.
This feeling and reaction is more potent
if one, the memory has to do with belonging
or personal attachment, like friends and family,
or if the feeling was a compelling impactful moment
in your life that had a lot of personal meaning,
maybe a big career thing or a big life-changing moment.
And number two, the feeling is more intense
the longer it's been since you've thought about it.
So like that feeling with me on the beach in Tijuana,
I literally had not thought about that in eight years.
And so looking at those photos,
it was a compelling, personal, meaningful moment.
My brain was going wild.
The studies on this don't just look at the FMRIs
and the brain and all of that stuff,
which is really interesting,
but it also looks at what actually happens
in the current day life of the person
who is experiencing nostalgia.
What some of these studies are finding
is that nostalgia can actually
increase somebody's personal view of themselves,
their self-esteem, and it can help combat
the effects of loneliness.
As I cultivated nostalgia,
I really started to understand why that is
and how that actually works.
I am listening to Weezer, to an album that came out
when I was a senior in high school,
and it is just flooding my world with this feeling.
One of the things that keeps coming back to me
is the people, the people I was with,
like the Friday nights I would have with my friends.
The place is there in my memory,
but the people I was with,
I feel their presence in some strange way
as I cultivate these memories, it's really weird.
I see their faces, I feel like I'm with them again.
It's good and warm, but it's also hurtful.
I found myself wanting to turn this music off
because I was like,
"Oh, I don't want to go there right now."
It's very, it's very contradictory, these feelings.
Anyway, back to it.
This is in keeping with my broader theory
about the stories we tell ourselves
and how the information in our little ring
is usually information we use to construct
our conscious story, and that introducing old memories
that are positive or meaningful or tell a different story
than your current one can really help you think differently
about who you are and what your life is.
Your conscious story becomes richer and more flush
with good experiences and positive information
about you and your life.
So while I was doing this, Nathaniel was also doing it
on his side, but in a very different way.
- We're off to a bad start here.
- [Man] Where are we?
- I have no idea.
We're here actually.
The last time I remember ever even holding a map like this
was with my mom 15 years ago.
- Okay, but nostalgia has a dark side too.
One of the big takeaways from the studies on nostalgia
find that people actually lean on nostalgia
during hard times.
They'll use it as sort of a coping mechanism
and this sometimes can be exploited by marketers
or in a lot of cases, politicians.
- Remember in the old days, when a crime was a crime?
- We will make America great again!
- This happens in so many different contexts,
to the far right nationalistic movements in Japan
that are hearkening back to the Japanese empire
and how much better it was.
You can also look at ISIS and their focus on hearkening back
to the glory days of the old caliphate.
It happened here in this country in 2016
with make America great again,
hearkening back to some ill-defined, fake, censored past
that never really existed but that helps people
who are maybe struggling with changing demographics
in the country or losing power
to feel like they have something to latch onto.
These political campaigns exploit that same brain process
that I experienced when I look at old photos,
but instead they utilize it to mobilize supporters.
So I did this for a month.
I cultivated nostalgia every day, listened to old music
and read journals and looked at old photos and footage,
and I can say that I definitely learned a lot.
So during these strange times of loneliness
and non-social interaction,
remember that your ring is full of information
that is not super indicative of who you really are.
If you're feeling lonely or disconnected,
I recommend you experiment with taking the edge off
with a dose of nostalgia.
I would probably wanna meet one of the guys
like Leonardo DaVinci that were really smart
and really good at painting.
Thanks for watching everybody.
This was quite the journey
and I have all these journals back here, maybe too much.
There's such thing as over documenting, I've learned.
So before you go, I want to just tell you
about Skillshare, who sponsored today's video.
Skillshare is a place where you go to learn new skills.
I'm a giant fan of online learning.
I believe you can open so many creative doors
if you dedicate yourself to taking online classes,
that's how I learned all of my skills
and Skillshare is a perfect place to do that.
It is incredibly cheap.
The first thousand people to use the link in my description
will get a free trial of Skillshare premium.
This is a membership that allows you to watch everything
on the Skillshare website for free,
from photography, to videography, to design,
to animation, to entrepreneurial skills, to cooking.
There are so many options.
What I love about Skillshare is that you pay
one subscription price and you get unlimited access
to all of the tutorials.
You could watch dozens of tutorials.
So go check that out.
There's a course on there that was actually just made
by our friend, Nathaniel Drew, who you saw in this video.
Nathaniel does a course on finding your voice
as an online creator, and it's a fantastic course.
He breaks down everything he knows
about creating a personal authentic voice
as a creator on the Internet.
Nathaniel is a very talented storyteller
and just a good teacher.
So go click the link in the description.
When you do that, it supports this channel,
but it also kick-starts a new chapter in your life
of learning skills on the Internet,
which, again, is a big value of mine.
So thank you all for watching
and hope you have a wonderful day.
We'll see you soon.