Think about the Fresh Prince theme song.
That should fill you with glee or likely you're dead inside.
That feeling is nostalgia, and while it feels good, it doesn’t always lead to making good decisions.
So, how does nostalgia permeate the brain?
And what exactly does it do our decision-making? Hit me with that theme song man!
I knew you were going to say that so I got one.
If you know me you know that I love the 90s, especially all the jams;
Michael Jackson’s Jam, Def Jam, NBA Jam, Jock Jams, Space Jam, wow we had a lot of jams back then.
And me loving the 90s makes me see the world differently than say, someone who loves the 1950s.
Nostalgia makes you look at the world through “rose-colored glasses” and we have an
emotional connection to memories like when we hear No Scrubs in the club, or someone
else hears Bruce Springsteen on the AM radio.
These emotions come from the brain, and you know how this goes. I'm going to do some science, you'll ingest it, we'll have fun.
One study out of Japan defined nostalgia as “experiencing predominantly positive emotions
when remembering autobiographical events.”
Autobiographies are our stories about us; our first date with Tevin Campbell, or when
I realized that having fun isn’t hard when you have a library card.
Nostalgia is our individual memories of what happened within those autobiographies and
are affected by the positive emotions we associate with them, the rose tinted history goggles.
Exposure to conditions inspiring nostalgic feelings activate part of the brain associated
with three things; memory, emotion, and reward.
The amygdala, known to modulate emotional responses, works in tandem with the hippocampus,
responsible for memory, to activate parts of the brain linked to reward like the ventral
striatum and the substantia nigra, among other regions.
So amygdala and hippocampus, who’s the boss?
It's Judith Light. Look it up, that's a reference.
The amygdala and the hippocampus interact with each other to encode our memories and
research suggests that they may actually govern two different memory encoding mechanisms,
but they interact when emotion is involved.
Think about a memory that brings you joy.
You’re getting that warm, positive feeling all over, right?
That’s dopamine.
Positive emotions have been linked to stronger detail oriented memories but research also
suggests that memories deteriorate over time, and both positive and negative emotions can
have an effect on how we remember incidents, which is part of why eyewitness testimony
can be faulty in the courtroom.
So hold on to those good times but they may not be 100% reliable in a court of law.
A 2015 study cited the positive effects of nostalgia as a “stabilizing force” allowing
us to push forward with a sense of personal continuity; a wonderful way to track our own
growth over time through anecdotes and we already know that nostalgia makes us feel a euphoric feeling.
This all sounds good, but while we use information from our past to dictate our futures, it’s
important not to let nostalgia cloud that future.
Research shows that people tend to favor positive memories over negative ones; we want to remember
fun memories over wack ones.
On the NPR podcast Hidden Brain, with my main man Shankar Vedantam, he chatted with psychologist
Clay Routledge who discussed the danger of allowing nostalgia to govern future decisions.
As negative memories start to fade, positive ones rise and bias us towards ignoring the
complexities of different situations and lean away from putting ourselves in other people’s shoes
to look at an issue, event, and situation and it might be because we’re lowkey drunk
on nostalgia.
Some people want to bring America back to a “golden age” in their opinion, but it
wasn’t golden for everyone.
For example, the ‘50s gave us American Bandstand, diners, and Pez which, objectively, are cool things.
But on the other hand, Black teens weren’t initially allowed in the audience of American
Bandstand aka #White Soul Train, and Black people couldn’t hit up diners because of
Jim Crow and #Segregation, and, well, anyone could have Pez but they taste like powdered doo-doo.
#Powdered doo-doo.
Here come the Pez heads in the comments. You don't like Pez you just hate me.
Not everyone has the same “good old days.”
If the people in power run the country based on their idea of the “good old days,”
it’s very possible that a) they’ll omit other people’s narratives if it doesn’t
align with their agenda, b) they’re trying to make the present like their past which
is the opposite of how time works, and c) it’s nostalgia for them, not for the good
of the whole system.
So, politically, historical nostalgia isn’t a platform to rally behind.
Listen, I’m trying to drink a Surge or a Crystal Pepsi while watching Moesha on UPN as Summertime
by DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince is on my Sony Walkman.
Nostalgia can help bring about positive moods and helps people cope with depression, but our
individual or collective nostalgia shouldn’t govern everyone else’s futures;
the past is the past for a reason.
When it comes to emotions, nostalgia is pretty one-note, and in an ever-changing, multicultural,
social landscape, maybe we shouldn’t let past Passions define the next Days of Our Lives.
References.
Nostalgia plays such a huge role in how we think about things in the present, but what
if the future could influence the past?
Yeah, sit down that’s a hard one.
I’m not about to go all John Conner on you, it’s called quantum retrocausality and you
can find out about it here.
Be sure to subscribe to Seeker and thank you for watching!