September 19, 2013 • 36 mins
Nostalgia: The Kryptonite of Existential Angst? Nostalgia is a bittersweet emotion that evokes a pleasurable memory tinged with the knowledge that you can never really go back. Find out why nostalgia was once considered a psychiatric disorder and why it actually may be balm for the soul.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
do you ever feel nostalgia creeping into your mind? I do? Yeah,
What do you What do you get nostalgic for? Well,
(00:24):
you know, every time I hear like the tinny streams
of an old twenties tune, I start feeling like I
need to do that Charleston remember the days back where
there were talkies. No talkies ruined everything. Oh but I mean,
I mean, it's entirely possible that you could feel nostalgic
for that, say, if you were old, if you were
introduced to a lot of say old timey movies when
(00:44):
you were younger, you could You're nostalgia could conceivably sort of, um,
skip back through time, and you could have sort of
an artificial nostalgia of the time from before you existed.
I do have an affinity for that time period. But
I will say that having a kid, I definitely have
experien areous nostalgia more deeply than I probably have ever
in my life. Because you're you're you're observing the child
(01:07):
at a certain age, and you're thinking back on your
own existence at that time, just because time seems to
pass so quickly and there's so many beautiful moments. And
then there's this idea actually we're sort of defining nostalgia
right now, but it's that idea that you have a
resurrection of a memory or a feeling that carries with
it sort of a bitter sweet feeling because you know
that time has passed and you can never retrieve that
(01:29):
moment again, and it was a beautiful moment, right. Yeah.
As a lot of people point out, in nostalgia tends
to hit you in a way where it it feels
it feels a little good, but not like whoa amazing,
It feels a little sad, but not in a like
a deeply depressive way. It's kind of this ambiguous, overall
positive feeling, but it's it's it's kind of all over
(01:51):
the place, you know. Like, I'll I found myself experiencing nostalgia. Um,
probably a lot more recently, and uh and I'll and
we'll talk about that as we we go here, but
like I'll find myself like thinking back to music that
I listened to when I was in high school, Like,
I find myself re exploring Tool albums and I still
(02:11):
like Tool to this day, but I was really into
them back in back in high school, back around the
time Annuma came out, and uh. And so I'm listening
to that, I'm feeling and I'm enjoying the songs, and
I'm feeling nostalgia and I'm thinking about uh, reading Lovecraft
for the first time and discovering this music and and
so on one hand, it's like a celebration of these
things that I still love. I still love Lovecraft, I
(02:32):
still love this music. But then I'm also thinking it
also makes me think or even subconsciously go back to
that time and uh. And it's weird because on one hand,
it's like I don't really wish I was a high
schooler again, Like that was a weird time and there
are so many things were out of place and uh,
and and yet there's something in me that's kind of
reaching back there or something from the past feels like
(02:54):
it's it's it's phantom limbs or are coming after me
in the present. Well, we're gonna it to that, We're
gonna get to this idea that this this idea of
first and in nostalgia, because they seem to be pretty
well connected and perhaps the reason why we continue to
dwell in this realm of nostalgia. John Tyrny, writing for
The New York Times, says that most people report experiencing
(03:16):
nostalgia at least once a week, and nearly half experience
at three or four times a week. Um Erica Hepper,
she's a psychologist at the University of Surrey and England,
found that nostalgia levels tend to be high among young adults.
This is really interesting too will get into this and
then dip in middle age and rise again during old age,
and that nostalgia begins as early as age seven. Well,
(03:39):
what do you have to nostalgic about an age seven?
You do, because I think that you have this awareness
that you're getting older. You're like, oh, man, I was
just thinking the other day about poop and my pants
and it was like, well, you know, like even uh,
my four year old will sometimes say I don't want
to I don't want to get older. I don't want
to grow up. Because she has the sense that she's
(04:01):
moving beyond time and she's moving beyond phases and that
there are other things in front of her. So it
doesn't surprise me that it's as young as seven that
kids start to look back and pine for some sort
of warm and cozy memory. You know. It's it's interesting
that we are talking about in nostalgia after just recording
an episode on the Oral boris the world consuming serpent,
(04:23):
the eternity snake, uh, the eternity dragon, because that is
a creature that is curving around and consuming its beginnings
and in and in doing so, creating this the cyclical
nature of itself. And in a sense, nostalgia is that
we are reaching back into the past and feasting on
our beginnings and it seems to uh to fill us
(04:45):
with us with some sort of energy. Well, and we're
recycling our memories. That's interesting because I was thinking about
this in terms of materialism like that when this is
one of the reasons I think that nostalgia has taken
such a hold in the United States, at least in
the US fifty years or something. You never since Coke
started serving up this idea of Santa Claus and all
these sort of classic warm memories post World War two,
(05:10):
because that's that's a way that you can easily access
that nostalgia, right, the music, it could be merchandise. And
I was starting to think about how, in some ways
our existence for each of us, it's almost like we're
living on a movie lot and we just kind of
roll in all these props that kind of make us
feel more connected to whatever it was or is important
(05:30):
to us in our lives. And a lot of that
has to do with nostalgia. Yeah, certainly. I mean, like
you said, the advertisements constantly changing the culture, at least
the visuals of it and to us, and also the
technology of it constantly changing, and and therefore we have
all of these obtainable physical, uh and or visual symbols
that we can call to to to feed that nostalgic
(05:53):
hunger in us. Yeah. I was thinking about the new
iPhone commercial. Have you seen this? It's basically just people
hanging out with their phones and going through um old
texts or conversations or um pictures and feeling nostalgic. And
I thought, well, this is interesting because they've they've taken
this phone and sort of made it a stand in
(06:16):
for the repository of your memories or nostalgia and connected
it that way. It sounds like a horrifying episode of
Black Mirror. It's it's supposed to be poignant, Well, it
sounds dark. Um. In fact, you might even say that
it sounds a little sick, and you would You wouldn't
be the first person to think that nostalgia sounds a
little bit like some variant of mental illness. So yeah,
(06:38):
I didn't realize this until I started doing research that
nostalgia was actually considered a psychiastric disorder at one time.
According to Dr Clay Rutledge writing for Scientific American, there's
a Swiss physician named Johannes Hoefer who coined the term
nostalgia in to describe what he considered a cerebral disease
you need to Swiss mercenaries fighting wars far from home.
(07:00):
He thought that nostalgia caused anxiety, insomnia, irregular heartbeat, and
disordered eating. And he also thought it was caused by
continuous vibrations of animal spirits through fibers in the middle brain. Yeah,
and it was like this big mystery. I mean, people
were like, oh, this this nostalogy. You've gotta be careful here.
Let's let's not play in ay these tunes because our
(07:22):
soldiers are going to go into a deep depression or
find what's the matter with these guys. Something must be
wrong that they're not enjoying fighting this war and risking
life and death far away from home. Why did they
keep getting all sentimental about a simpler time back in
a place that they know and loved. Yes, sick, this
was this is really interesting. This is New York Times
article UM called nostalgia? What is it good for? It
(07:43):
says that military physicians thought that it had to do
with the soldiers ear drums and brain cells being damaged
by the unremitting clanging of cow bells in the Alps.
So it was you know, obviously this was not a
well studied area. UM. I like to imagine the study
that might have happened, though, where you have two test groups,
(08:04):
one exposed to alpine cow bells and the other not. Right,
I know, So was it the cow bells? No, it's
not at all. Um in this persisted this idea really
into the twentieth century and professor of history at Weber
State University, her name is Susan J. Matt. She said
that this disease of nostalgia was known about in the
United States during the Civil War and there were seventy
(08:26):
four deaths from it on the Union side, in more
than cases in the Surgeon General's records, and it became
such a problem that they banned army bands from playing
Home Sweet Home. Now. Now here's one of the something
that occurs to me out of these examples for starters. Okay,
nostalgia the things I feel nostalgic about, like, and I
(08:48):
think a lot of people do. Like nostalge atends to
apply to things that by and large don't matter in
and of themselves, Like you like the feeling you feel for,
say a departed loved one that has died, like that.
It's not nostalgia that is, that's like a deeper, more
close emotion, you know. But but nostalgia is a little
harder to classific. It seems like two things need to
(09:10):
happen for you to feel nostalgia. Either your your physical
surroundings have to change. You have have to travel somewhere
and and in in olden times, whine would you travel
a long distance, especially if you were not particularly into
the idea you would do so because you were engaged
in the military conquest of some kind. Or what has
to happen is the world around you has to change.
(09:32):
It has to the music changes, the advertisements change, the
technology changes, etcetera. And then and then you you feel
this nostalgic link to a place that doesn't really exist anymore. So,
I wonder to what extent in previous ages it was
harder to feel nostalgia because you weren't necessarily going to
(09:52):
ever leave the area in which you lived. You know,
you'd be more or less surrounded by the same places
and uh, and the the level of technology, the level
you know, the basic aesthetics of the world around you
would more or less remain intact. Now that's interesting, especially
for a grarian based societies. Right, so ten thousand years on,
(10:12):
we primarily have just been in the same place, except
for when you begin to think about place like the
United States of America, which is a very young country
and in a country that many people immigrated to and
people continue to move around. And that's sort of an
American thing, is that you, um, you find your survival
by sort of picking up and going and uh doing
(10:35):
something for yourself that's new in a new area, new possibilities, right,
the gold Rush, so on and so forth. We encountered
that on Facebook all the time we all have that
have that friend who's had a tough time. They're like,
I said, I'm moving, leaving to a different city, going
to start over somewhere new. And that's that's the the
idea in itself. You know, I'm going to change my
physical surroundings and in doing so, I will change who
I am. Well the Susan J. Matt, the professor of
(10:58):
history UM, she was actually saying in that way that
nostalgia became a very un American emotion because not only
did it have this association with the psychiatric disorder of
people who had come back from war, but it was
this idea that was opposed this whole like manifest destiny,
(11:18):
that you need to not feel homesick, that you need
to pick up and move and begin your life and new.
And so she was saying that it was very interesting
to see the ways that it's represented in American culture,
and really in American culture that, uh, nostalgia doesn't truly
get embraced until after World War Two, and she says
(11:39):
that much of that can be attributed to the fact
that during World War One they began to better understand
nostalgia and they began to better understand that people who
came home who were depressed and who had anxiety had
signs of the newly established syndrome of shell shock, not nostalgia.
You know, in a sense, the idea of nostalgia as
(12:00):
a negative force, it does make a lot of sense
because in a sense, it is looking back to the past,
clinging to the past, instead of moving forward and uh
and welcoming new things. So I can I can easily
see where it could it could be interpreted as a
negative force. And if you were nostalgic for things that
are harmful, either like say, hey man, I really miss
cocaine or something, you know, like that would be bad nostalgia.
(12:23):
Or when you see like people who are really in
to say, images of sort of an imagined anti Bellum South,
you know that that can be kind of disturbing as well,
Like you're kind of nostalgic for a thing that didn't
quite exist the way you think it did and was
really kind of a horrific time, right, which kind of
gives you that whole idea that again, memory and the
(12:46):
way that we construct our world is unique to every
single person, right, we just sort of all agree on
a set of conditions to say, hey, this is how
we're defining the world. But everything else is up for interpretation.
But it does turn out, and we'll talk about this
after the break, but it does for now that nostalgia
actually is a good thing by and large because it
helps to regulate our emotions. That being said, I'm gonna
(13:09):
go get nostalgic for for some talkies and the carton cigarettes. Kids.
All right, we're back. We've been talking about nostalgia. We
talked a little bit about the toxic nostalgia, but for
(13:31):
the most part, this is a positive force in our lives.
It is, and we should probably scratch at what exactly
actually characterizes the experiences of nostalgia. Dr Clay Rutledge, who
I talked about before, his research focuses on how they
need to perceive life as meaningful, impacts mental and physical health,
close relationships, and intergroup relations. So of course he's very
(13:54):
interested in nostalgia, and he says that these memories tend
to be focused on momentous or perly meaningful life events
that prominently feature close others, so friends, family, romantic partners,
family vacations, road trips with friends, weddings, graduation, uh birthday, parties,
(14:14):
gatherings for the holidays, all these sorts of things are
these cherished experiences. Yeah, I can see that, like just
thinking about family trips, Like I instantly think of family
trips to the beach, and like oysters, like raw oysters
with cocktail sauce and salting crackers. There you go. See. So, now,
(14:35):
if you are one of the participants in one of
his studies, that's probably what you are. One of the
things that you might have written about. And one of
the things that were Ledge found with the participants is
that when they were writing about their nostalgic experiences, um,
and when someone went through and sort of weeded out
everything else, they found that there were many more positive
(14:56):
emotion related words used than negative emotion from related words,
which I thought was interesting because it's come up before
that we tend to have better recall and use of
negative words than positive ones in general. But here's this
case where you have just a outflowing of positive words. UM.
(15:16):
Kind of giving you a hint as to where this
is going in terms of your mindset. Yeah. So, researchers
have looked at the causes of nostalgia and they found
that there are a number of things that can kick
it off. Social interactions, So like you're getting together with
an old friend and you're talking, hey, remember that that
teacher we had in college, And the next thing, you know,
an nostalgic or some either a particular experience or some
(15:36):
sort of fragment of that time. UM sensory inputs music,
you hear an old song and you're like, oh, man,
I haven't listened to this in forever. Nostalgia or a smell,
And we talked before about how would smell that kind
of undercuts our conscious labeling of experiences. So we'll smell
something and will suddenly be so nostalgic for something, and
(15:57):
we don't even necessarily remember what we're being nostalgic for,
but that smell will take us back to sort of
a general time frame. Tangible objects of course, old photographs,
you know, somebody's old watch, somebody's old wedding ring. You
handle that and it'll take you back. And the iPhone.
I mean, people do get nostalgic about their technology. Like
(16:17):
one of the nostalgic trips that um I have found
a musing I interviewed a guy who is really into
it for the blogs and uh and I've gotten into
it a bit too. Is VHS nostalgia, Like we know,
when when we were done with VHS is and we
moved to two DVDs, like we couldn't have most people
just couldn't get rid of those VHS tapes soon enough,
(16:39):
just dump that we have a better technology around. But
now people were really filling this, uh, this flood of
nostalgia for and in my case is a lot of
it is the films of that time and the kind
of looking sound that they had the digital film scores.
But then some people are like really hardcore nostalgic and
and even obsessive about the technology itself. They're like they're
(17:00):
they're buying old VCRs, fixing them up, They're collecting tapes
sometimes spending uh kind of crazy amounts of money on
on what to any other I would be a just
a beat up piece of discarded technology. Well you you
hear the same sort of thing in the recordings of
music sometimes, like people prefer to hear the scratchiness or
just that the imperfections as opposed to everything that's eded
(17:21):
out and so clean. Um, you know, I think that
was one of the chief complaints of going from a
record player to a cassette player. Yeah, the distortions and
the imperfections of the sound become a part of what
we loved about them. Uh. Two artists, in particular musical artists.
There's a musical artist named Tycho. And then of course
Boards of Canada. Both of these groups, especially Boards of Canada,
(17:43):
really employ uh, this nostalgic, audible nostalgia for for sounds
that are sort of distorted, old electronic soundtracks, this kind
of thing. And uh, and they weave all these things together,
like take the things we're nostaluted for and boil them
down to their basics and then reassemble them into two
a new um sonic form. And then so you're you're
taking it in. It's a it's a new thing, but
(18:05):
at the same time it is is heavily nostalgic. You
have to stay with an accordion. I just feel that,
I mean and growing a theremin and I'm just a puddle.
You're before this is through, you will tell us something
you're actually nostalgic for. I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding
about that at all. All right, maybe you are a
time traveler, time lord, even everybody, all right, So those
(18:29):
are some of the things that cause of nostalgia. But
in these studies, a negative mood was the most commonly
reported cause of nostalgia and uh and and generally loneliness
was the most frequently listed negative emotion that led to
nostalgia yeah, which led to the researchers positing that psychological
threat was the culprit for digging into the past and
(18:51):
using nostalgia as a kind of bomb. And of course,
how did they do this or bear this out? They
triggered a sense of loneliness in their participants. They had
one group who, after completing a questionnaire, were told that
they scored high on loneliness. And then they had a
second control group which they said that you don't rate
very high on loneliness. And then they asked all the
(19:12):
participants to complete a measure of nostalgia. And it turns
out the participants in loneliness condition reported being significantly more
nostalgic than participants in the control group. And then, just
just to make sure that this was really going on,
they had another study in which some volunteers read a
story by a supposed Oxford philosopher who wrote that life
(19:34):
is meaningless because any single person's contribution to the world
is quote paltry, pathetic, and pointless. And of course the
idea here is that there's a theme that threatens perceived
meaning in our lives. And then they had another group
read a neutral story. Again, it was those people who
read about life being meaningless who indulged in nostalgic thoughts
(19:57):
and feelings. Well, you know, I I compared this to
my own experiences because right now I'm not I'm not
in a lonely state of mind or a depressed state
of mind. But um, tomorrow evening on, my wife and
are flying to China. We're gonna pick up our son,
and it's gonna we're gonna be there for two weeks,
and it's gonna be kind of stressful, and it's gonna
be like a life changing event. Uh. And so I
(20:20):
feel a certain amount of anxiety about that, and I
feel a lot of intense excitement about it. And then
and then also just like you know, seven siultaneous heart
attacks here and there, as I as I think about it,
and so I can only assume that a lot of
my recent nostalgia, as opposed to do sort of general
in nostalgia, has maybe risen out of that. It's possible.
I mean, do you find yourself kind of not that now,
(20:41):
not that we need to get you on the psychologists
couch here or anything, but do you find yourself kind
of accessing childhood memories? And yeah, definitely. I mean when
especially when it comes to purchasing books for the child
and looking at toys, and then you know, I'll say, oh,
I have this book. He's like, oh my goodness, I
don't have a copy of the star Belt Sneeches in
the house. Yeah. I had that as a kid. And
(21:02):
and then and maybe that's why the Starbid Sneeches have
come up in like three different podcasts recently, because I
keep thinking back to the things that influenced me as
a child as I consider this child coming into my life. Yeah,
it's possible. Your son is very lucky. By the way, Sorry,
well try Yeah alright, Um, No, I didn't mean to
(21:22):
get all of a clemp fish. Um. So, I mean,
as you we can tell, there are definitely benefits here
to indulging in nostalgia because it does kind of make
you feel as though perhaps you are re centering your
universe of meaning just by accessing this information and reframing
what's going on in your current life? Right? Um? Now
(21:42):
from the journal Current Directions and Psychological Science, paper by
Clay Rutledge again says that nostalgist serves at least four
key psychological functions. I'm talking about generating positive effect, elevating
actual self esteem, which I was sort of surprised to me,
fostering social connectedness, and alleviating that existential threat that there's
(22:05):
no meaning in life. Right. Indeed, the social connectedness thing
really interests me because of course you think about nostalgias,
and other people are inevitably going to share your nostalgia.
And I mean, I dare anyone to give me an
example of something they're nostalgic for that nobody else on
the planet feels that pull towards like uh, you know,
I mentioned like the VHS thing. Uh, people feel nostalgia
(22:27):
for that, and so their whole communities where they talk
about trading these tapes, they talk about the technology. Uh.
And certainly with any kind of music or media or art,
people are going to gather around it. They're going to
draw these uh, sometimes forgotten artists back from obscurity and
celebrate them again. So no matter what your nostalgia is
you're gonna find a community of people, especially online that
(22:47):
share it, and you're going to feel this intense connection
with people like, hey, weird team VHS or weird team. Um,
I don't know old Beatles albums, I don't know. Whatever
you're nostalgia is, it's true, right, Yeah, you're you're right.
There's sort of a more universal we all feel this
way and we're all connected in that way. But there's
also like, you know, maybe someone was involved, uh in
watching this movie, this particular of VHS movie with you,
(23:10):
and then you think back about your connectedness to that
person as well. But I thought it was interesting too
that self esteem was involved in that relige. Did a
number of studies that bore out that self esteem again,
perhaps this connectedness or the sense of accomplishment was underlying
reason for that self esteem. And it again brings me
(23:31):
back to this idea that we no longer reside in
like the same community in the same place and share
the same uh sort of general social group anymore. We
move out, we moved to new places that are in
those places themselves are constantly changing, so you you reach
to things like like old VHS tapes or old music,
(23:51):
and those become sort of the social connection with a
surrounding that the earlier people would have had just by
being in the place that they call home. That they
were right, which makes me think about embodied cognition. We
talked about this embodied cognition UM, this idea that things,
or even um putting on a certain kind of clothes
(24:14):
would affect the way that your your brain behaves and
the way that you think. And so then I was
reminded of the study that we came upon about feeling
warm when you indulge in nostalgic thoughts. And this was
a study or rather an experiment in the Netherlands by J. J. M.
Winger Hoots of Tilburg University. Uh. He and his colleagues
(24:38):
found that listening to songs made people feel not only nostalgic,
but warmer physically. And then this is this is where
it gets kind of even crazier. Uh The New Zoo
of sun yat Sen University tracks students over the course
of a month and found that feelings of nostalgia were
more common on cold days. And they found that people
(25:00):
in a cool room around sixty eight degrees fahrenheit were
more likely to engage in nostalgia than people in warmer rooms,
and of course as a result, they felt warmer. Well.
I wonder if that has anything to do with the
fact that every time October rolls around. I also I
often feel like a lot of nostalgia because I'm getting
the Halloween season, So I'm getting nostalgic about Halloween, uh,
(25:21):
celebrations of the past and all bits of Halloween themed media.
But also the temperature is changing, so yeah, and I
and I actually start to think about certain foods and
experience as too, thinking about fall foods and winter foods
and all that. This is an interesting perspective. Psychologist Tim
Wilsheit says that if you can recruit a memory to
maintain physiological comfort, this idea that you would feel warm
(25:44):
through this memory. Um. He said that at least subjectively,
that could be an amazing and complex adaptation. It could
contribute to survival by making look for food and shelter
that much longer. So presumably he's talking about in an
evolutionary sense. So one might be out in the wilderness
trying to find a place that can sustain them, and
they are in the process sustained by nostalgia. For a
(26:07):
place that sustained them, or even just a thing that
sustained You're right. It doesn't even have to be like O,
our our ancestors needed, you know, they were out in
the wild. It could just be that you were on
say a long hiking trip, and he didn't pack as
much water as you needed to our food, and you
needed to go back into your memories to to get
that sort of warmth and again that idea that there
(26:27):
is rhyme and reason for what you're doing. There's some
sort of grand master plan, and nostalgia helps to recenter
that reason for living and meaning. And it's so crazy
how some of the things we feel nostalgic for. I mean,
there are things that we're nostalgic for that at the
time we were kind of been different to like VHS
distortion disorted sound or distorted uh you know imagery that
(26:49):
was just part of watching a VHS tape. No, we
known't not anything special about it. You might think, oh,
that's kind of weird or neat, but now it's the
thing we feel the pool towards. Or I think back
to going to church, going to a Baptist church when
I was a kid, and we were seeing all these hymns,
and I hated the most of the hymns. I means
have some of them are fun to sing, I guess,
but but for the most part, I did not have
a lot of love for Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.
(27:12):
But now I hear it and I get kind of
nostalgic for it. And even even though it's not something
that I like consciously had had a lot or any
love for at the time, so we had it's and
I think there are a lot of examples of that
in people's lives. You're suddenly nostalgic for something that really
didn't matter all that much back in the day. So
I have an example of that too, and it's hearing
football on a Sunday. I hated hearing it around was
(27:35):
little because it usually meant that my dad was going
to be sort of like tents and like perhaps even
yelling at the screen sometimes. But now I hear it
and it just makes me feel again like fall is
upon us. There's gonna be popcorn, you know, there's there's
comforts and security there and all these delicious foods too,
like cocktail leanings in the Red Side. Oh yeah, that's
(27:59):
what made me become agittarian. Yeah. So along those lines,
there is of course the nostalgic bump, the reminiscence bump,
to consider an kind of a cultural sense. Yeah, this
is an interesting article by Katie Walden writing for Slate magazine.
The article is called The Mysterious Memorable Twenties, and it's
an interesting article because it talks about a person's twenties
(28:22):
being a no man's land between childhood and stable adulthood
and perhaps the reason why there is something called that
reminiscence bump where you have a ton of these memories
and nostalgia packed into that time period. Okay, so as
you as you move forward, you think back to that,
that your twenties, and that's an area that's just rich
in influences. Yeah, because it turns out that we we
(28:43):
just remember more events from late adolescents in early adulthood
than from any other stage of our lives. So there
are a couple of theories about that. There's a nineteen
study by Cohen and Faulkner that found that of vivid
life memories concern unique or first time events, and between
the ages of ten and thirty there are a lot
(29:05):
of first right, So that's that buys into this idea
that you're encountering the first time that you wrote a bike,
the first time that you drove a car, that you
kissed a girl, that kissed a boy, that you had pizza,
that you know, all these are first. But then after
age thirty, it all kind of gets a bit wrote, right, like,
(29:25):
kind of you still have experienced you didn't check off
the list during that first period. I guess it's true,
but most things that you encounter just in living become wrote,
So you really do have to go after those new
experiences after that certain age. Right, and you're thirty, you've
kind of done most of what everybody else is done.
But the idea there is that you just chock full
(29:47):
of first and that perhaps is the reason why, uh,
we have so many memories or nostalgia available to us. Then,
but then you have this guy David C. Rubin who
comes along in his book Remembering Our Past, and he
says on a small portion of the memories that constitute
the bump, this reminiscence bump, relate to novel experiences. So
that gets you to this idea. Another theory that jumps
(30:11):
in here that it's identity based, and that there's a
narrative perspective here, and that it's kind of all flowing
into the story that we make of ourselves. And this
story is really right between those ages because that's when
we are becoming who we are becoming, right, and we're
thinking about the person we're going to become. We're looking
(30:32):
back in the roof of a mirror on the person
we've been. Yes. Yeah, And in fact, Katie Walden, the
writer of that article, sites and study by Judith Gluck
and Susan Bluck. Yeah, and they have proposed that there's
a convergence of three qualities that make an event invalliable
in our minds. So the first one is that it
(30:53):
has to be joyous. Two is that it allows us
to exert control. So again, this identity making this is
the thing that makes me who I am. This is
like a part of me. Yes. In three we perceive
it to be highly influential over the course of our lives.
So that kind of fits into this narrative identity, a
(31:14):
based account of ourselves. Right, Like on some level, like
when I'm thinking back on these different things of nostotic
for I'm saying, hey, I'm a tool guy, i am
a VHS guy, I am a leaning on the everlasting arms.
I mean in a sense. I mean, I guess I'm
nostalgic for it because I do look back on the
things about being raised in a Baptist church that have
(31:36):
shaped me and and some of the aspects of that
that remain with me to this day. See. And I
think that that theory really does kind of line up
really well with why we concentrate so many of our
memories and nostalgia during that time period, because there's you know,
I have some friends who could have cared less about
high school, but I have other friends who are like, oh,
that's great, and for them during that time, there were
(31:59):
certain things that really helped to identify who they were
as a person. Yeah, so it kind of makes sense. Well,
I guess that's it. I'm already feeling nostalgic. Yeah, we
only just finished it. And then that's the way it
is with nostalgia. Something happens and then before you know what,
you're nostalgic about it. It seems like just the other day.
It was a new experience, that's right, one that built
(32:22):
our identities and made us feel a worm and cozy
and gave us little uptick in our self esteem. Yeah,
and again, it's like the Aora bors it's the snake.
It's moving forward in time, and then at some point
it turns back around and it goes back to its
point of beginning, and in that sense, becomes eternal. Here's
here's my little outro question to you. Do you think
on a generation ship? And I think I've seen this
(32:42):
depicted somewhere, says this is not an original thought. I'm
on a spaceship that's we're headed off to a distant planet.
It's going to take generations of generations of generation lives
to get there. How how much nostalgia and what types
of nostalgia. Let's say the generation ship leaves tomorrow, do
you think we'll be on board? Just Beyonce may it? Well?
Beyonce is easy to bring, either in musical form or frozen.
(33:05):
She will have her own generation ship, thank you very much.
I could see, I mean a sense, some of these
cultural figures they would kind of become like gods. And
I mean you could argue they already are or modern
gods in our modern, modern avatars. So I could see
them being important. But I wonder if you're on a
generation ship, particularly if it was a generation ship that
(33:26):
wasn't particularly earthy in its design, we would quickly become
far more nostalgic for the many details of of life
here on Earth, some of the simple things you know, um,
and not necessarily the big things like you know, mountains
and gravity, but the smaller things like you know, pigs,
I don't know. Yeah, And would you start would it
(33:46):
become just completely ridiculous, like instead of just going to
the coffee maker on the generationship, like there was such
a nostalgia for coffee that you'd have your own beings
that you would grind, that you would pick out of
civic cats poop. Yeah, possibly so, or would become maybe
nostalgic for things like pencils. You know, why would you
have a pencil in a generation ship? Would be something
you could never have again? Like when would you get
(34:07):
around to recreating pencils on another world? You wouldn't. I
think you're right, and I think there would be this
whole like pencil economy on that ship. You know, it
would be like people would have them in class cases
because yeah, you have to make them from scratch. That
would be it would require a crazy amount of effort
or just print them out or print them out. But
that's the thing too, if you had three D printing
(34:28):
and nostalgia coming together, that would be almost a dangerous
combination because every little nostalgia trip you'd be like, oh
my man, I remember, I remember pencils and pens. I'm
going to print out every possible variation of pencil and
pen and I encounter. Gotta do the mechanical, I got
to do the normal that do the thick one, got
to do the color pencils, Gotta do the the ink
pen that had three different heads in it and you
would click them, the one with a flashlight in the rear. Well,
(34:51):
what else are you gonna do on a generations ship anyway? Right,
And which means that that generation ship, I see how
this is going, is going to be completely weighted down
with junk and it's not even gonna make its destination
because we've all turned into a bunch of hoarders or
we're having to jettison nostalgia junk like every like every
week or so. So the flight from Earth to a
planet X becomes just this trail, this rat trail of
(35:14):
droppings like nostalgia drop pics, just floating in space to
mark our passage. Yeah, that would be more likely. I
see that. Well, there you go. Nostalgia, What it is,
what drives it, some of the science behind it. Obviously
everyone out there listening to this episode has something to
contribute on this. What what are you missed doubting for? Particularly?
Is it? What's what is the nostalgic force that is
(35:37):
either most interesting to us or most sort of weird
to you? Like, what's something you're nostalgic for that you
again didn't even really like all that much back in
the day, but now you've identified as a part of
who you are. Let us know about all that. You
can find us in all the general places. We're on Facebook,
We're on tumbler on Twitter. Our homepage is stuffed tobow
your mind dot com and there you'll find our blog posts,
(35:58):
our videos are audio podcast as well as links out
to all of our social media uh embodiments. And you
can always drop his line at below the mind at
Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
do you ever feel nostalgia creeping into your mind? I do? Yeah,
What do you What do you get nostalgic for? Well,
(00:24):
you know, every time I hear like the tinny streams
of an old twenties tune, I start feeling like I
need to do that Charleston remember the days back where
there were talkies. No talkies ruined everything. Oh but I mean,
I mean, it's entirely possible that you could feel nostalgic
for that, say, if you were old, if you were
introduced to a lot of say old timey movies when
(00:44):
you were younger, you could You're nostalgia could conceivably sort of, um,
skip back through time, and you could have sort of
an artificial nostalgia of the time from before you existed.
I do have an affinity for that time period. But
I will say that having a kid, I definitely have
experien areous nostalgia more deeply than I probably have ever
in my life. Because you're you're you're observing the child
(01:07):
at a certain age, and you're thinking back on your
own existence at that time, just because time seems to
pass so quickly and there's so many beautiful moments. And
then there's this idea actually we're sort of defining nostalgia
right now, but it's that idea that you have a
resurrection of a memory or a feeling that carries with
it sort of a bitter sweet feeling because you know
that time has passed and you can never retrieve that
(01:29):
moment again, and it was a beautiful moment, right. Yeah.
As a lot of people point out, in nostalgia tends
to hit you in a way where it it feels
it feels a little good, but not like whoa amazing,
It feels a little sad, but not in a like
a deeply depressive way. It's kind of this ambiguous, overall
positive feeling, but it's it's it's kind of all over
(01:51):
the place, you know. Like, I'll I found myself experiencing nostalgia. Um,
probably a lot more recently, and uh and I'll and
we'll talk about that as we we go here, but
like I'll find myself like thinking back to music that
I listened to when I was in high school, Like,
I find myself re exploring Tool albums and I still
(02:11):
like Tool to this day, but I was really into
them back in back in high school, back around the
time Annuma came out, and uh. And so I'm listening
to that, I'm feeling and I'm enjoying the songs, and
I'm feeling nostalgia and I'm thinking about uh, reading Lovecraft
for the first time and discovering this music and and
so on one hand, it's like a celebration of these
things that I still love. I still love Lovecraft, I
(02:32):
still love this music. But then I'm also thinking it
also makes me think or even subconsciously go back to
that time and uh. And it's weird because on one hand,
it's like I don't really wish I was a high
schooler again, Like that was a weird time and there
are so many things were out of place and uh,
and and yet there's something in me that's kind of
reaching back there or something from the past feels like
(02:54):
it's it's it's phantom limbs or are coming after me
in the present. Well, we're gonna it to that, We're
gonna get to this idea that this this idea of
first and in nostalgia, because they seem to be pretty
well connected and perhaps the reason why we continue to
dwell in this realm of nostalgia. John Tyrny, writing for
The New York Times, says that most people report experiencing
(03:16):
nostalgia at least once a week, and nearly half experience
at three or four times a week. Um Erica Hepper,
she's a psychologist at the University of Surrey and England,
found that nostalgia levels tend to be high among young adults.
This is really interesting too will get into this and
then dip in middle age and rise again during old age,
and that nostalgia begins as early as age seven. Well,
(03:39):
what do you have to nostalgic about an age seven?
You do, because I think that you have this awareness
that you're getting older. You're like, oh, man, I was
just thinking the other day about poop and my pants
and it was like, well, you know, like even uh,
my four year old will sometimes say I don't want
to I don't want to get older. I don't want
to grow up. Because she has the sense that she's
(04:01):
moving beyond time and she's moving beyond phases and that
there are other things in front of her. So it
doesn't surprise me that it's as young as seven that
kids start to look back and pine for some sort
of warm and cozy memory. You know. It's it's interesting
that we are talking about in nostalgia after just recording
an episode on the Oral boris the world consuming serpent,
(04:23):
the eternity snake, uh, the eternity dragon, because that is
a creature that is curving around and consuming its beginnings
and in and in doing so, creating this the cyclical
nature of itself. And in a sense, nostalgia is that
we are reaching back into the past and feasting on
our beginnings and it seems to uh to fill us
(04:45):
with us with some sort of energy. Well, and we're
recycling our memories. That's interesting because I was thinking about
this in terms of materialism like that when this is
one of the reasons I think that nostalgia has taken
such a hold in the United States, at least in
the US fifty years or something. You never since Coke
started serving up this idea of Santa Claus and all
these sort of classic warm memories post World War two,
(05:10):
because that's that's a way that you can easily access
that nostalgia, right, the music, it could be merchandise. And
I was starting to think about how, in some ways
our existence for each of us, it's almost like we're
living on a movie lot and we just kind of
roll in all these props that kind of make us
feel more connected to whatever it was or is important
(05:30):
to us in our lives. And a lot of that
has to do with nostalgia. Yeah, certainly. I mean, like
you said, the advertisements constantly changing the culture, at least
the visuals of it and to us, and also the
technology of it constantly changing, and and therefore we have
all of these obtainable physical, uh and or visual symbols
that we can call to to to feed that nostalgic
(05:53):
hunger in us. Yeah. I was thinking about the new
iPhone commercial. Have you seen this? It's basically just people
hanging out with their phones and going through um old
texts or conversations or um pictures and feeling nostalgic. And
I thought, well, this is interesting because they've they've taken
this phone and sort of made it a stand in
(06:16):
for the repository of your memories or nostalgia and connected
it that way. It sounds like a horrifying episode of
Black Mirror. It's it's supposed to be poignant, Well, it
sounds dark. Um. In fact, you might even say that
it sounds a little sick, and you would You wouldn't
be the first person to think that nostalgia sounds a
little bit like some variant of mental illness. So yeah,
(06:38):
I didn't realize this until I started doing research that
nostalgia was actually considered a psychiastric disorder at one time.
According to Dr Clay Rutledge writing for Scientific American, there's
a Swiss physician named Johannes Hoefer who coined the term
nostalgia in to describe what he considered a cerebral disease
you need to Swiss mercenaries fighting wars far from home.
(07:00):
He thought that nostalgia caused anxiety, insomnia, irregular heartbeat, and
disordered eating. And he also thought it was caused by
continuous vibrations of animal spirits through fibers in the middle brain. Yeah,
and it was like this big mystery. I mean, people
were like, oh, this this nostalogy. You've gotta be careful here.
Let's let's not play in ay these tunes because our
(07:22):
soldiers are going to go into a deep depression or
find what's the matter with these guys. Something must be
wrong that they're not enjoying fighting this war and risking
life and death far away from home. Why did they
keep getting all sentimental about a simpler time back in
a place that they know and loved. Yes, sick, this
was this is really interesting. This is New York Times
article UM called nostalgia? What is it good for? It
(07:43):
says that military physicians thought that it had to do
with the soldiers ear drums and brain cells being damaged
by the unremitting clanging of cow bells in the Alps.
So it was you know, obviously this was not a
well studied area. UM. I like to imagine the study
that might have happened, though, where you have two test groups,
(08:04):
one exposed to alpine cow bells and the other not. Right,
I know, So was it the cow bells? No, it's
not at all. Um in this persisted this idea really
into the twentieth century and professor of history at Weber
State University, her name is Susan J. Matt. She said
that this disease of nostalgia was known about in the
United States during the Civil War and there were seventy
(08:26):
four deaths from it on the Union side, in more
than cases in the Surgeon General's records, and it became
such a problem that they banned army bands from playing
Home Sweet Home. Now. Now here's one of the something
that occurs to me out of these examples for starters. Okay,
nostalgia the things I feel nostalgic about, like, and I
(08:48):
think a lot of people do. Like nostalge atends to
apply to things that by and large don't matter in
and of themselves, Like you like the feeling you feel for,
say a departed loved one that has died, like that.
It's not nostalgia that is, that's like a deeper, more
close emotion, you know. But but nostalgia is a little
harder to classific. It seems like two things need to
(09:10):
happen for you to feel nostalgia. Either your your physical
surroundings have to change. You have have to travel somewhere
and and in in olden times, whine would you travel
a long distance, especially if you were not particularly into
the idea you would do so because you were engaged
in the military conquest of some kind. Or what has
to happen is the world around you has to change.
(09:32):
It has to the music changes, the advertisements change, the
technology changes, etcetera. And then and then you you feel
this nostalgic link to a place that doesn't really exist anymore. So,
I wonder to what extent in previous ages it was
harder to feel nostalgia because you weren't necessarily going to
(09:52):
ever leave the area in which you lived. You know,
you'd be more or less surrounded by the same places
and uh, and the the level of technology, the level
you know, the basic aesthetics of the world around you
would more or less remain intact. Now that's interesting, especially
for a grarian based societies. Right, so ten thousand years on,
(10:12):
we primarily have just been in the same place, except
for when you begin to think about place like the
United States of America, which is a very young country
and in a country that many people immigrated to and
people continue to move around. And that's sort of an
American thing, is that you, um, you find your survival
by sort of picking up and going and uh doing
(10:35):
something for yourself that's new in a new area, new possibilities, right,
the gold Rush, so on and so forth. We encountered
that on Facebook all the time we all have that
have that friend who's had a tough time. They're like,
I said, I'm moving, leaving to a different city, going
to start over somewhere new. And that's that's the the
idea in itself. You know, I'm going to change my
physical surroundings and in doing so, I will change who
I am. Well the Susan J. Matt, the professor of
(10:58):
history UM, she was actually saying in that way that
nostalgia became a very un American emotion because not only
did it have this association with the psychiatric disorder of
people who had come back from war, but it was
this idea that was opposed this whole like manifest destiny,
(11:18):
that you need to not feel homesick, that you need
to pick up and move and begin your life and new.
And so she was saying that it was very interesting
to see the ways that it's represented in American culture,
and really in American culture that, uh, nostalgia doesn't truly
get embraced until after World War Two, and she says
(11:39):
that much of that can be attributed to the fact
that during World War One they began to better understand
nostalgia and they began to better understand that people who
came home who were depressed and who had anxiety had
signs of the newly established syndrome of shell shock, not nostalgia.
You know, in a sense, the idea of nostalgia as
(12:00):
a negative force, it does make a lot of sense
because in a sense, it is looking back to the past,
clinging to the past, instead of moving forward and uh
and welcoming new things. So I can I can easily
see where it could it could be interpreted as a
negative force. And if you were nostalgic for things that
are harmful, either like say, hey man, I really miss
cocaine or something, you know, like that would be bad nostalgia.
(12:23):
Or when you see like people who are really in
to say, images of sort of an imagined anti Bellum South,
you know that that can be kind of disturbing as well,
Like you're kind of nostalgic for a thing that didn't
quite exist the way you think it did and was
really kind of a horrific time, right, which kind of
gives you that whole idea that again, memory and the
(12:46):
way that we construct our world is unique to every
single person, right, we just sort of all agree on
a set of conditions to say, hey, this is how
we're defining the world. But everything else is up for interpretation.
But it does turn out, and we'll talk about this
after the break, but it does for now that nostalgia
actually is a good thing by and large because it
helps to regulate our emotions. That being said, I'm gonna
(13:09):
go get nostalgic for for some talkies and the carton cigarettes. Kids.
All right, we're back. We've been talking about nostalgia. We
talked a little bit about the toxic nostalgia, but for
(13:31):
the most part, this is a positive force in our lives.
It is, and we should probably scratch at what exactly
actually characterizes the experiences of nostalgia. Dr Clay Rutledge, who
I talked about before, his research focuses on how they
need to perceive life as meaningful, impacts mental and physical health,
close relationships, and intergroup relations. So of course he's very
(13:54):
interested in nostalgia, and he says that these memories tend
to be focused on momentous or perly meaningful life events
that prominently feature close others, so friends, family, romantic partners,
family vacations, road trips with friends, weddings, graduation, uh birthday, parties,
(14:14):
gatherings for the holidays, all these sorts of things are
these cherished experiences. Yeah, I can see that, like just
thinking about family trips, Like I instantly think of family
trips to the beach, and like oysters, like raw oysters
with cocktail sauce and salting crackers. There you go. See. So, now,
(14:35):
if you are one of the participants in one of
his studies, that's probably what you are. One of the
things that you might have written about. And one of
the things that were Ledge found with the participants is
that when they were writing about their nostalgic experiences, um,
and when someone went through and sort of weeded out
everything else, they found that there were many more positive
(14:56):
emotion related words used than negative emotion from related words,
which I thought was interesting because it's come up before
that we tend to have better recall and use of
negative words than positive ones in general. But here's this
case where you have just a outflowing of positive words. UM.
(15:16):
Kind of giving you a hint as to where this
is going in terms of your mindset. Yeah. So, researchers
have looked at the causes of nostalgia and they found
that there are a number of things that can kick
it off. Social interactions, So like you're getting together with
an old friend and you're talking, hey, remember that that
teacher we had in college, And the next thing, you know,
an nostalgic or some either a particular experience or some
(15:36):
sort of fragment of that time. UM sensory inputs music,
you hear an old song and you're like, oh, man,
I haven't listened to this in forever. Nostalgia or a smell,
And we talked before about how would smell that kind
of undercuts our conscious labeling of experiences. So we'll smell
something and will suddenly be so nostalgic for something, and
(15:57):
we don't even necessarily remember what we're being nostalgic for,
but that smell will take us back to sort of
a general time frame. Tangible objects of course, old photographs,
you know, somebody's old watch, somebody's old wedding ring. You
handle that and it'll take you back. And the iPhone.
I mean, people do get nostalgic about their technology. Like
(16:17):
one of the nostalgic trips that um I have found
a musing I interviewed a guy who is really into
it for the blogs and uh and I've gotten into
it a bit too. Is VHS nostalgia, Like we know,
when when we were done with VHS is and we
moved to two DVDs, like we couldn't have most people
just couldn't get rid of those VHS tapes soon enough,
(16:39):
just dump that we have a better technology around. But
now people were really filling this, uh, this flood of
nostalgia for and in my case is a lot of
it is the films of that time and the kind
of looking sound that they had the digital film scores.
But then some people are like really hardcore nostalgic and
and even obsessive about the technology itself. They're like they're
(17:00):
they're buying old VCRs, fixing them up, They're collecting tapes
sometimes spending uh kind of crazy amounts of money on
on what to any other I would be a just
a beat up piece of discarded technology. Well you you
hear the same sort of thing in the recordings of
music sometimes, like people prefer to hear the scratchiness or
just that the imperfections as opposed to everything that's eded
(17:21):
out and so clean. Um, you know, I think that
was one of the chief complaints of going from a
record player to a cassette player. Yeah, the distortions and
the imperfections of the sound become a part of what
we loved about them. Uh. Two artists, in particular musical artists.
There's a musical artist named Tycho. And then of course
Boards of Canada. Both of these groups, especially Boards of Canada,
(17:43):
really employ uh, this nostalgic, audible nostalgia for for sounds
that are sort of distorted, old electronic soundtracks, this kind
of thing. And uh, and they weave all these things together,
like take the things we're nostaluted for and boil them
down to their basics and then reassemble them into two
a new um sonic form. And then so you're you're
taking it in. It's a it's a new thing, but
(18:05):
at the same time it is is heavily nostalgic. You
have to stay with an accordion. I just feel that,
I mean and growing a theremin and I'm just a puddle.
You're before this is through, you will tell us something
you're actually nostalgic for. I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding
about that at all. All right, maybe you are a
time traveler, time lord, even everybody, all right, So those
(18:29):
are some of the things that cause of nostalgia. But
in these studies, a negative mood was the most commonly
reported cause of nostalgia and uh and and generally loneliness
was the most frequently listed negative emotion that led to
nostalgia yeah, which led to the researchers positing that psychological
threat was the culprit for digging into the past and
(18:51):
using nostalgia as a kind of bomb. And of course,
how did they do this or bear this out? They
triggered a sense of loneliness in their participants. They had
one group who, after completing a questionnaire, were told that
they scored high on loneliness. And then they had a
second control group which they said that you don't rate
very high on loneliness. And then they asked all the
(19:12):
participants to complete a measure of nostalgia. And it turns
out the participants in loneliness condition reported being significantly more
nostalgic than participants in the control group. And then, just
just to make sure that this was really going on,
they had another study in which some volunteers read a
story by a supposed Oxford philosopher who wrote that life
(19:34):
is meaningless because any single person's contribution to the world
is quote paltry, pathetic, and pointless. And of course the
idea here is that there's a theme that threatens perceived
meaning in our lives. And then they had another group
read a neutral story. Again, it was those people who
read about life being meaningless who indulged in nostalgic thoughts
(19:57):
and feelings. Well, you know, I I compared this to
my own experiences because right now I'm not I'm not
in a lonely state of mind or a depressed state
of mind. But um, tomorrow evening on, my wife and
are flying to China. We're gonna pick up our son,
and it's gonna we're gonna be there for two weeks,
and it's gonna be kind of stressful, and it's gonna
be like a life changing event. Uh. And so I
(20:20):
feel a certain amount of anxiety about that, and I
feel a lot of intense excitement about it. And then
and then also just like you know, seven siultaneous heart
attacks here and there, as I as I think about it,
and so I can only assume that a lot of
my recent nostalgia, as opposed to do sort of general
in nostalgia, has maybe risen out of that. It's possible.
I mean, do you find yourself kind of not that now,
(20:41):
not that we need to get you on the psychologists
couch here or anything, but do you find yourself kind
of accessing childhood memories? And yeah, definitely. I mean when
especially when it comes to purchasing books for the child
and looking at toys, and then you know, I'll say, oh,
I have this book. He's like, oh my goodness, I
don't have a copy of the star Belt Sneeches in
the house. Yeah. I had that as a kid. And
(21:02):
and then and maybe that's why the Starbid Sneeches have
come up in like three different podcasts recently, because I
keep thinking back to the things that influenced me as
a child as I consider this child coming into my life. Yeah,
it's possible. Your son is very lucky. By the way, Sorry,
well try Yeah alright, Um, No, I didn't mean to
(21:22):
get all of a clemp fish. Um. So, I mean,
as you we can tell, there are definitely benefits here
to indulging in nostalgia because it does kind of make
you feel as though perhaps you are re centering your
universe of meaning just by accessing this information and reframing
what's going on in your current life? Right? Um? Now
(21:42):
from the journal Current Directions and Psychological Science, paper by
Clay Rutledge again says that nostalgist serves at least four
key psychological functions. I'm talking about generating positive effect, elevating
actual self esteem, which I was sort of surprised to me,
fostering social connectedness, and alleviating that existential threat that there's
(22:05):
no meaning in life. Right. Indeed, the social connectedness thing
really interests me because of course you think about nostalgias,
and other people are inevitably going to share your nostalgia.
And I mean, I dare anyone to give me an
example of something they're nostalgic for that nobody else on
the planet feels that pull towards like uh, you know,
I mentioned like the VHS thing. Uh, people feel nostalgia
(22:27):
for that, and so their whole communities where they talk
about trading these tapes, they talk about the technology. Uh.
And certainly with any kind of music or media or art,
people are going to gather around it. They're going to
draw these uh, sometimes forgotten artists back from obscurity and
celebrate them again. So no matter what your nostalgia is
you're gonna find a community of people, especially online that
(22:47):
share it, and you're going to feel this intense connection
with people like, hey, weird team VHS or weird team. Um,
I don't know old Beatles albums, I don't know. Whatever
you're nostalgia is, it's true, right, Yeah, you're you're right.
There's sort of a more universal we all feel this
way and we're all connected in that way. But there's
also like, you know, maybe someone was involved, uh in
watching this movie, this particular of VHS movie with you,
(23:10):
and then you think back about your connectedness to that
person as well. But I thought it was interesting too
that self esteem was involved in that relige. Did a
number of studies that bore out that self esteem again,
perhaps this connectedness or the sense of accomplishment was underlying
reason for that self esteem. And it again brings me
(23:31):
back to this idea that we no longer reside in
like the same community in the same place and share
the same uh sort of general social group anymore. We
move out, we moved to new places that are in
those places themselves are constantly changing, so you you reach
to things like like old VHS tapes or old music,
(23:51):
and those become sort of the social connection with a
surrounding that the earlier people would have had just by
being in the place that they call home. That they
were right, which makes me think about embodied cognition. We
talked about this embodied cognition UM, this idea that things,
or even um putting on a certain kind of clothes
(24:14):
would affect the way that your your brain behaves and
the way that you think. And so then I was
reminded of the study that we came upon about feeling
warm when you indulge in nostalgic thoughts. And this was
a study or rather an experiment in the Netherlands by J. J. M.
Winger Hoots of Tilburg University. Uh. He and his colleagues
(24:38):
found that listening to songs made people feel not only nostalgic,
but warmer physically. And then this is this is where
it gets kind of even crazier. Uh The New Zoo
of sun yat Sen University tracks students over the course
of a month and found that feelings of nostalgia were
more common on cold days. And they found that people
(25:00):
in a cool room around sixty eight degrees fahrenheit were
more likely to engage in nostalgia than people in warmer rooms,
and of course as a result, they felt warmer. Well.
I wonder if that has anything to do with the
fact that every time October rolls around. I also I
often feel like a lot of nostalgia because I'm getting
the Halloween season, So I'm getting nostalgic about Halloween, uh,
(25:21):
celebrations of the past and all bits of Halloween themed media.
But also the temperature is changing, so yeah, and I
and I actually start to think about certain foods and
experience as too, thinking about fall foods and winter foods
and all that. This is an interesting perspective. Psychologist Tim
Wilsheit says that if you can recruit a memory to
maintain physiological comfort, this idea that you would feel warm
(25:44):
through this memory. Um. He said that at least subjectively,
that could be an amazing and complex adaptation. It could
contribute to survival by making look for food and shelter
that much longer. So presumably he's talking about in an
evolutionary sense. So one might be out in the wilderness
trying to find a place that can sustain them, and
they are in the process sustained by nostalgia. For a
(26:07):
place that sustained them, or even just a thing that
sustained You're right. It doesn't even have to be like O,
our our ancestors needed, you know, they were out in
the wild. It could just be that you were on
say a long hiking trip, and he didn't pack as
much water as you needed to our food, and you
needed to go back into your memories to to get
that sort of warmth and again that idea that there
(26:27):
is rhyme and reason for what you're doing. There's some
sort of grand master plan, and nostalgia helps to recenter
that reason for living and meaning. And it's so crazy
how some of the things we feel nostalgic for. I mean,
there are things that we're nostalgic for that at the
time we were kind of been different to like VHS
distortion disorted sound or distorted uh you know imagery that
(26:49):
was just part of watching a VHS tape. No, we
known't not anything special about it. You might think, oh,
that's kind of weird or neat, but now it's the
thing we feel the pool towards. Or I think back
to going to church, going to a Baptist church when
I was a kid, and we were seeing all these hymns,
and I hated the most of the hymns. I means
have some of them are fun to sing, I guess,
but but for the most part, I did not have
a lot of love for Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.
(27:12):
But now I hear it and I get kind of
nostalgic for it. And even even though it's not something
that I like consciously had had a lot or any
love for at the time, so we had it's and
I think there are a lot of examples of that
in people's lives. You're suddenly nostalgic for something that really
didn't matter all that much back in the day. So
I have an example of that too, and it's hearing
football on a Sunday. I hated hearing it around was
(27:35):
little because it usually meant that my dad was going
to be sort of like tents and like perhaps even
yelling at the screen sometimes. But now I hear it
and it just makes me feel again like fall is
upon us. There's gonna be popcorn, you know, there's there's
comforts and security there and all these delicious foods too,
like cocktail leanings in the Red Side. Oh yeah, that's
(27:59):
what made me become agittarian. Yeah. So along those lines,
there is of course the nostalgic bump, the reminiscence bump,
to consider an kind of a cultural sense. Yeah, this
is an interesting article by Katie Walden writing for Slate magazine.
The article is called The Mysterious Memorable Twenties, and it's
an interesting article because it talks about a person's twenties
(28:22):
being a no man's land between childhood and stable adulthood
and perhaps the reason why there is something called that
reminiscence bump where you have a ton of these memories
and nostalgia packed into that time period. Okay, so as
you as you move forward, you think back to that,
that your twenties, and that's an area that's just rich
in influences. Yeah, because it turns out that we we
(28:43):
just remember more events from late adolescents in early adulthood
than from any other stage of our lives. So there
are a couple of theories about that. There's a nineteen
study by Cohen and Faulkner that found that of vivid
life memories concern unique or first time events, and between
the ages of ten and thirty there are a lot
(29:05):
of first right, So that's that buys into this idea
that you're encountering the first time that you wrote a bike,
the first time that you drove a car, that you
kissed a girl, that kissed a boy, that you had pizza,
that you know, all these are first. But then after
age thirty, it all kind of gets a bit wrote, right, like,
(29:25):
kind of you still have experienced you didn't check off
the list during that first period. I guess it's true,
but most things that you encounter just in living become wrote,
So you really do have to go after those new
experiences after that certain age. Right, and you're thirty, you've
kind of done most of what everybody else is done.
But the idea there is that you just chock full
(29:47):
of first and that perhaps is the reason why, uh,
we have so many memories or nostalgia available to us. Then,
but then you have this guy David C. Rubin who
comes along in his book Remembering Our Past, and he
says on a small portion of the memories that constitute
the bump, this reminiscence bump, relate to novel experiences. So
that gets you to this idea. Another theory that jumps
(30:11):
in here that it's identity based, and that there's a
narrative perspective here, and that it's kind of all flowing
into the story that we make of ourselves. And this
story is really right between those ages because that's when
we are becoming who we are becoming, right, and we're
thinking about the person we're going to become. We're looking
(30:32):
back in the roof of a mirror on the person
we've been. Yes. Yeah, And in fact, Katie Walden, the
writer of that article, sites and study by Judith Gluck
and Susan Bluck. Yeah, and they have proposed that there's
a convergence of three qualities that make an event invalliable
in our minds. So the first one is that it
(30:53):
has to be joyous. Two is that it allows us
to exert control. So again, this identity making this is
the thing that makes me who I am. This is
like a part of me. Yes. In three we perceive
it to be highly influential over the course of our lives.
So that kind of fits into this narrative identity, a
(31:14):
based account of ourselves. Right, Like on some level, like
when I'm thinking back on these different things of nostotic
for I'm saying, hey, I'm a tool guy, i am
a VHS guy, I am a leaning on the everlasting arms.
I mean in a sense. I mean, I guess I'm
nostalgic for it because I do look back on the
things about being raised in a Baptist church that have
(31:36):
shaped me and and some of the aspects of that
that remain with me to this day. See. And I
think that that theory really does kind of line up
really well with why we concentrate so many of our
memories and nostalgia during that time period, because there's you know,
I have some friends who could have cared less about
high school, but I have other friends who are like, oh,
that's great, and for them during that time, there were
(31:59):
certain things that really helped to identify who they were
as a person. Yeah, so it kind of makes sense. Well,
I guess that's it. I'm already feeling nostalgic. Yeah, we
only just finished it. And then that's the way it
is with nostalgia. Something happens and then before you know what,
you're nostalgic about it. It seems like just the other day.
It was a new experience, that's right, one that built
(32:22):
our identities and made us feel a worm and cozy
and gave us little uptick in our self esteem. Yeah,
and again, it's like the Aora bors it's the snake.
It's moving forward in time, and then at some point
it turns back around and it goes back to its
point of beginning, and in that sense, becomes eternal. Here's
here's my little outro question to you. Do you think
on a generation ship? And I think I've seen this
(32:42):
depicted somewhere, says this is not an original thought. I'm
on a spaceship that's we're headed off to a distant planet.
It's going to take generations of generations of generation lives
to get there. How how much nostalgia and what types
of nostalgia. Let's say the generation ship leaves tomorrow, do
you think we'll be on board? Just Beyonce may it? Well?
Beyonce is easy to bring, either in musical form or frozen.
(33:05):
She will have her own generation ship, thank you very much.
I could see, I mean a sense, some of these
cultural figures they would kind of become like gods. And
I mean you could argue they already are or modern
gods in our modern, modern avatars. So I could see
them being important. But I wonder if you're on a
generation ship, particularly if it was a generation ship that
(33:26):
wasn't particularly earthy in its design, we would quickly become
far more nostalgic for the many details of of life
here on Earth, some of the simple things you know, um,
and not necessarily the big things like you know, mountains
and gravity, but the smaller things like you know, pigs,
I don't know. Yeah, And would you start would it
(33:46):
become just completely ridiculous, like instead of just going to
the coffee maker on the generationship, like there was such
a nostalgia for coffee that you'd have your own beings
that you would grind, that you would pick out of
civic cats poop. Yeah, possibly so, or would become maybe
nostalgic for things like pencils. You know, why would you
have a pencil in a generation ship? Would be something
you could never have again? Like when would you get
(34:07):
around to recreating pencils on another world? You wouldn't. I
think you're right, and I think there would be this
whole like pencil economy on that ship. You know, it
would be like people would have them in class cases
because yeah, you have to make them from scratch. That
would be it would require a crazy amount of effort
or just print them out or print them out. But
that's the thing too, if you had three D printing
(34:28):
and nostalgia coming together, that would be almost a dangerous
combination because every little nostalgia trip you'd be like, oh
my man, I remember, I remember pencils and pens. I'm
going to print out every possible variation of pencil and
pen and I encounter. Gotta do the mechanical, I got
to do the normal that do the thick one, got
to do the color pencils, Gotta do the the ink
pen that had three different heads in it and you
would click them, the one with a flashlight in the rear. Well,
(34:51):
what else are you gonna do on a generations ship anyway? Right,
And which means that that generation ship, I see how
this is going, is going to be completely weighted down
with junk and it's not even gonna make its destination
because we've all turned into a bunch of hoarders or
we're having to jettison nostalgia junk like every like every
week or so. So the flight from Earth to a
planet X becomes just this trail, this rat trail of
(35:14):
droppings like nostalgia drop pics, just floating in space to
mark our passage. Yeah, that would be more likely. I
see that. Well, there you go. Nostalgia, What it is,
what drives it, some of the science behind it. Obviously
everyone out there listening to this episode has something to
contribute on this. What what are you missed doubting for? Particularly?
Is it? What's what is the nostalgic force that is
(35:37):
either most interesting to us or most sort of weird
to you? Like, what's something you're nostalgic for that you
again didn't even really like all that much back in
the day, but now you've identified as a part of
who you are. Let us know about all that. You
can find us in all the general places. We're on Facebook,
We're on tumbler on Twitter. Our homepage is stuffed tobow
your mind dot com and there you'll find our blog posts,
(35:58):
our videos are audio podcast as well as links out
to all of our social media uh embodiments. And you
can always drop his line at below the mind at
Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how staff works dot com.
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