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