Nostalgia: Tangible Memory
Have you ever been walking down a street and caught a whiff that brings up a deep memory? Or listened to a song and cried because it reminds you of your ex? Or maybe even just watched a movie from your childhood that invoked a fuzzy, warm feeling? Well that, my friends, is nostalgia. It’s a word many of us are familiar with, but do we really know what causes it? The University of Southampton describes nostalgia as a complex emotion that involves past-oriented cognition and a mixed affective signature. Wow. Those were some daunting words. Putting it more simply, nostalgia is an emotion often connected to our senses.
When the senses are subject to repeated stimuli, your brain begins to associate the stimuli with whatever person, event, or time-period it’s in proximity with. The stimuli must be repeated or significant enough to hold some level of importance. That’s why when you smell a Big Mac you don’t immediately get ‘nostalgic’ for McDonalds even though your brain may associate that smell with Mcdonalds.
Think of it as more like going to your grandma's house and smelling her perfume every time you’re there, then smelling the same perfume in a Macy’s and being reminded of your grandma or fond memories you had with her.
However, stimuli can only bring out nostalgia when it’s no longer regularly present. There’s a reason you might get nostalgic entering the middle school (a place you hardly go anymore) and not when you enter the high school (a place you’re frequently at.)
In essence, in order for stimuli to trigger nostalgic emotions, it must be associated with a significant person; time period; or memory, it must be repeated, and must eventually become extinct.
You may be wondering which senses trigger the strongest feelings of nostalgia, and the answer is that it’s all subjective. Some people may react strongly to a song that reminds them of their ex, while others may react more to the smell of a certain shampoo their ex used. The power of nostalgia is all rooted in the power of memory. The more vivid and significant the memory of the event, person, or time-period, the more likely our brains are going to react to the familiar stimuli.
Nostalgia is funny in the way that we never notice when it’s being created. Eventually, stimuli we are currently receiving–whether it be from an important person, a specific classroom, or even just the body wash you’re currently using–will eventually be stimuli used to trigger nostalgia. In a few years we might smell the same body wash or hear a popular song from the time and immediately be brought back to high school. Sometimes it’s fun to consider how the things you’re doing that seem so mundane will eventually be nothing more than a nostalgic memory.
Now that you know what nostalgia is and why we experience it, the next time you get that reminiscent feeling when passing your childhood home or stumbling upon your old teddy bear, you can embrace the fact that those things did, and always will, hold meaning to you.