Speaker 1: Pushkin. It's birthday season. Here at the Happiness Lab, we
Speaker 1: are celebrating our fifth year anniversary, and it's prompted us
Speaker 1: to go back into the archive to pull out five
Speaker 1: of my most memorable and meaningful episodes from the hundreds
Speaker 1: that we've made. My producer Ryan has number three on
Speaker 1: the list, which.
Speaker 2: Is so to show from season three called why Nostalgia
Speaker 2: Ain't So Rosie and I think I know why you
Speaker 2: have to grab this one out, but why don't you.
Speaker 3: Tell the listeners?
Speaker 1: Is it because of our main guest who we start
Speaker 1: with my heart throb? Yes, so this is an episode
Speaker 1: where I got to interview the actor Roblow, who definitely
Speaker 1: was one of my eighties heart throbs. I believe you
Speaker 1: made fun of me for a smile on my face
Speaker 1: in the Zoom interview. Yes, I looked a little cheesy.
Speaker 2: And this was the first big season we made during
Speaker 2: the COVID lockdown, So I remember sitting with you on
Speaker 2: Zoom and with Rob Low teld so many funny stories
Speaker 2: and did all the accents we couldn't fit them all name.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, and aside from all as Hollywood anecdotes,
Speaker 1: Rob also really helped us understand the psychology of nostalgia,
Speaker 1: both the parts of nostalgia that we get right that
Speaker 1: help us in the parts of nostalgia that lead us astray.
Speaker 2: Because Ro's very nostalgic. I mean, there's also things in
Speaker 2: his youth he remembers fondly, but as I remember, he's
Speaker 2: also careful not to get caught up in them. What
Speaker 2: are the things you get nostalgia about?
Speaker 1: Well, Rob in eighties movies obviously, you know, really cheesy
Speaker 1: music from the nineties. I mean, there's so many things
Speaker 1: I get nostalgic about. And I think that's the beauty
Speaker 1: of our understanding of the nostalgia, right, is that nostalgic
Speaker 1: can kind of bring us joy. But as we'll see
Speaker 1: in this episode, it's something that we don't want to
Speaker 1: get caught up in. We want to be nostalgic without
Speaker 1: falling prey to the pitfalls of nostalgia. And that is
Speaker 1: what I think you'll learn today. So here is why
Speaker 1: nostalgia ain't so rosy. When you hear the word nostalgia,
Speaker 1: where do your thoughts go?
Speaker 2: Oh boy?
Speaker 4: You know, it gets triggered, you know, usually by music
Speaker 4: or smell like hot air and pines. That combination and
Speaker 4: then if you throw in a little bit of salt
Speaker 4: water reminds me of the very first time I ever
Speaker 4: saw California in nineteen seventy six, when I first set
Speaker 4: foot out here and started my journey to where I
Speaker 4: am today. So that really gets me nostalgia.
Speaker 1: You're listening to one of the most surreal conversations of
Speaker 1: my life. I'm talking about nostalgia with the actor who
Speaker 1: personifies some of my fondest eighties memories, Rob Low. If
Speaker 1: you're a child of the eighties like me, Rob is
Speaker 1: an icon. He was part of pretty much everything I'm
Speaker 1: embarrassed to love about that decade. He was in ABC
Speaker 1: after school specials. He started in classic eighties movies like
Speaker 1: See Almost Fire and The Outsiders. He was a member
Speaker 1: of the infamous Brat Pack. He was on the cover
Speaker 1: of Teen Beat magazine week after week. He dated all
Speaker 1: my teen girl idols, from Demi Moore to Winona Ryder.
Speaker 1: He played the saxophone, or at least I thought he did.
Speaker 1: Do you actually play the sax or was that just
Speaker 1: for the movie.
Speaker 4: Let me tell you something, I am a longtime actor.
Speaker 4: I can fake do almost anything. I can fake shoot
Speaker 4: a gun, I can fake repel. I can fake play
Speaker 4: the saxophone like no other and I have fooled many
Speaker 4: a person with it.
Speaker 1: And let's not even get started on his hair.
Speaker 4: I used more hair moose than any human being should
Speaker 4: ever use.
Speaker 1: All this goes to say that even though I was
Speaker 1: trying to be my smoothest professional podcast Yelle professor self,
Speaker 1: when I chatted with Rob, I was finding it really
Speaker 1: hard to hold it together.
Speaker 4: When the Carpenters come on the radio and you're like
Speaker 4: immediately next to your grandpa co driving his station wagon
Speaker 4: and you're nine or eleven years old, It's it's awesome,
Speaker 4: it's magic. You're in a time machine. You're literally in
Speaker 4: a time machine.
Speaker 1: But I love the time machine point because you know,
Speaker 1: in some sense, you've created that time machine for other people,
Speaker 1: you know, even for me, Like just talking with you
Speaker 1: on the zoom call, I hear your voice, and I
Speaker 1: hear certain ways that you express things in certain parts
Speaker 1: of your smile, and I'm taking back to you know,
Speaker 1: movies I watched in grade school and with friends and
Speaker 1: fun times in college, and you know, what does it
Speaker 1: feel like to be creating the time machine for other people?
Speaker 4: That is amazing? That makes me feel so good. It
Speaker 4: really does because I can put the shoe on the
Speaker 4: other foot so easily, you know, when I meet my
Speaker 4: heroes or whatever and go, hey, man, what that song
Speaker 4: you wrote? I played it at my wedding to me
Speaker 4: hearing feedback like that. At the end of the day,
Speaker 4: it's the real reason I think that I became an
Speaker 4: actor and got into this business was to move people
Speaker 4: and create memories for them, because memories are all you got.
Speaker 4: That's all you got.
Speaker 1: Rob is right here. When we look back at our lives,
Speaker 1: our memories are all we've got, and reliving all those
Speaker 1: nostalgic moments often feels really fun. But nostalgia can also
Speaker 1: cause pain. Research shows that if we're not careful, our
Speaker 1: happiest memories have a way of messing with our future
Speaker 1: well being, making us downplay bad experiences or totally misremember
Speaker 1: the past, which can set us up for some potentially
Speaker 1: damaging choices. So how can we experience the benefits of
Speaker 1: nostalgia in a way that doesn't hurt our happiness? How
Speaker 1: can we relive our fond past memories in a way
Speaker 1: that doesn't hurt our future selves. Our minds are constantly
Speaker 1: telling us what to do to be happy. But what
Speaker 1: if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are
Speaker 1: lying to us, leading us away from what will really
Speaker 1: make us happy. The good news is that understanding the
Speaker 1: science of the mind can point us all back in
Speaker 1: the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lap with
Speaker 1: doctor Larry Santos So full disclosure. I am a nostalgia junkie.
Speaker 1: When I have a tough day at work, I rewatch
Speaker 1: old movies or play the classic songs that I loved
Speaker 1: in high school. So you can imagine my total glee
Speaker 1: when I learned that I share a fondness for all
Speaker 1: things old school with my eighties heart throb Rob Low.
Speaker 4: I love nostalgia. I love that I'm on this podcast
Speaker 4: right now because I'm very big on it.
Speaker 1: The science shows that Rob and I are not alone here.
Speaker 1: Nostalgia is an incredibly common experience. In fact, one study
Speaker 1: found that around eighty percent of participants reported feeling nostalgic
Speaker 1: at least once a week.
Speaker 4: If you were to look over my shoulder at night
Speaker 4: when I'm going down my YouTube wormhole, it's all nostalgia.
Speaker 4: It's all history, nostalgia related behind the scenes of seventies music,
Speaker 4: all of that stuff.
Speaker 1: Like me, Rob loves thinking back to the songs of
Speaker 1: his youth and the concerts he enjoyed when he was young.
Speaker 1: For him, a big one was seeing his idol Bruce
Speaker 1: Springsteen live for the first time.
Speaker 4: One of the things I remember that crazy time was
Speaker 4: going to see him at Giants Stadium and it's the
Speaker 4: Born in the USA tour.
Speaker 1: Talk about nostalgia, but Rob's concert memories are also a
Speaker 1: bit different than many of ours.
Speaker 4: The stadium's full, it's just before showtime, and I walk
Speaker 4: in and people start noticing and saying hello and wunning
Speaker 4: an autograph, and the next thing I know, the entire
Speaker 4: stadium is chanting my name. I get really like embarrassed.
Speaker 4: But the good news is that led the Springsteen people
Speaker 4: to get me the hell out of the stadium and backstage,
Speaker 4: and that's how I finally met Bruce.
Speaker 1: The same is true for his memories of eighties television.
Speaker 1: Rob also loves to get nostalgic about bad old school TV.
Speaker 1: I told him stories of how I used to run
Speaker 1: off the school bus to catch my favorite afternoon shows.
Speaker 1: But Rob's childhood TV watching stories are a bit more
Speaker 1: over the top than mine, because Rob wasn't just watching
Speaker 1: those ABC afternoon specials, he was also starring in them.
Speaker 4: And I use that as an excuse to go up
Speaker 4: to the cutest girl in the school and kind of
Speaker 4: try to chat her up. And her name was Jennifer,
Speaker 4: and one thing led to another, and she invited me
Speaker 4: to come to her house and watch the after school special.
Speaker 4: And she was like, you know, my dad's in acting,
Speaker 4: so you know that'll be great. So I roll up
Speaker 4: to her house. It's a mansion in Beverly Hills. First
Speaker 4: time I've ever seen a mansion. And I opened the
Speaker 4: door and it's Carrie Grant in a bathrobe. And so
Speaker 4: we watched my little stupid after school special with Kerry Grant,
Speaker 4: and afterwards he was like, you remind me son of
Speaker 4: a young Warring Batty, which I took as a huge compliment.
Speaker 1: As I heard more and more about Rob's incredible stories,
Speaker 1: I realized that he might not be the best starting
Speaker 1: point for understanding the average persons connection between nostalgia and happiness.
Speaker 4: I love the eighties, but I had obviously a very
Speaker 4: very very unique seat at the eighties.
Speaker 1: So to get a more scientific sense of why we
Speaker 1: love thinking about the past, I decided to turn to
Speaker 1: someone else I thought could help. My friend and colleague,
Speaker 1: Felipe Diregard.
Speaker 5: I'm an addict to nostalgia. Yes, I love it. I
Speaker 5: relished that feeling.
Speaker 1: Felipe is an academic triple threat. He's a professor of psychology,
Speaker 1: cognitive neuroscience and philosophy at Duke University.
Speaker 5: Full disclosure. There are times in which I feel that
Speaker 5: I was born in the wrong time. I love the
Speaker 5: nineteen twenties. I love hats. I love like dressing up nicely,
Speaker 5: you know, like chatting with Virginia Wall. I have a
Speaker 5: very nostalgia physic about that.
Speaker 1: But Felipe isn't just a fan of nostalgia. He's also
Speaker 1: an academic expert on the topic.
Speaker 5: The term nostalgia was coined in the sixteen hundreds, and
Speaker 5: he was originally considered a neurological commission, which is very
Speaker 5: interesting because neurology and psychiatry were well There was no
Speaker 5: such a thing as psychiatric back then. But it was
Speaker 5: very clearly considered a condition of the body, and it
Speaker 5: was thought to mainly affect army personnel. It was described
Speaker 5: in Germany and it was mostly thought off to affect
Speaker 5: Swiss soldiers, and then there were all sorts of very
Speaker 5: interesting origin stories as to why people felt nostalgia. One
Speaker 5: of them had to do with ear drum damage due
Speaker 5: to the incessant clanging of the cow bells in Switzerland.
Speaker 5: There were stories about atmospheric pressure and so on and
Speaker 5: so forth, but it was always considered a malady. It
Speaker 5: was considered an illness of the body, mainly a neurological illness,
Speaker 5: and also that it was associated with depression, anxiety, lack
Speaker 5: of appititet son. It wasn't until much later where people
Speaker 5: started to think that there might be something positive about nostalgia.
Speaker 1: It's kind of amazing that it took hundreds of years
Speaker 1: for scholars to realize that nostalgia actually felt good. These days,
Speaker 1: scientists are learning that the effects of this bitter sweet
Speaker 1: emotion are often more sweet than better. In fact, psychologists
Speaker 1: have observed that thinking wistfully about the past can make
Speaker 1: us feel really good.
Speaker 5: We use memories just as we use imagination to make
Speaker 5: us feel better now. So nostalgia is a very good
Speaker 5: way of going on a little mental vacation without leaving
Speaker 5: your home. And when you cannot leave your home, that's
Speaker 5: the best way, and you can do it right.
Speaker 1: One of the times that our brains especially seek out
Speaker 1: old memories is when we're feeling more alone than usual.
Speaker 5: There's been a lot of research on making people feel
Speaker 5: kind of lonely, isolated, and stuff like that that tends
Speaker 5: to elicit a little bit more feelings of nostalgia. So
Speaker 5: it looks as though it is when you're in a
Speaker 5: negative situation that you're more likely to generate this sense
Speaker 5: of nostalgia.
Speaker 1: If you've listened to other episodes of the Happiness Lab,
Speaker 1: you probably know that feeling socially connected is an important
Speaker 1: condition for happiness. But it's not just the right now
Speaker 1: connection we get from seeing friends in the present that
Speaker 1: makes us happy. Research shows we also get a happiness
Speaker 1: boost from merely thinking about past social times, especially if
Speaker 1: we're feeling lonely in the present. As one scientific paper
Speaker 1: nicely put it, during nostalgic reverie, the mind is peopled.
Speaker 1: But science has found another way that nostalgia can boost
Speaker 1: our well being. Re Experiencing the paths can help us
Speaker 1: feel better about how things went back in the day,
Speaker 1: which is important because, let's face it, our past selves
Speaker 1: weren't always our best selves past us is didn't always
Speaker 1: make those smartest choices, something my eighties idol Rob Low
Speaker 1: knows all too well.
Speaker 4: Look, there are people who live through the eighties, and
Speaker 4: there are people who live through the eighties.
Speaker 1: If you read Rob's memoir stories I only tell my friends,
Speaker 1: you know that Rob had some pretty rough times early
Speaker 1: in his career, and that's one of the reasons he
Speaker 1: personally loves nostalgia so much. When we look back at
Speaker 1: some of the bad choices of our youth, we often
Speaker 1: do so with a bit more clarity than we had
Speaker 1: when we were living through those events.
Speaker 4: And I don't think nostalgia is nostalgia without that underpinning,
Speaker 4: you know, and also, looking back on anything, you have
Speaker 4: twenty twenty hindsight. So if you're being nostalgic and you're
Speaker 4: looking back, implicit in that is what would I have
Speaker 4: done differently?
Speaker 1: This redemptive lens through which we naturally view the past
Speaker 1: means that we remember even the worst events with a
Speaker 1: positive spin. We recall the good parts and neglect the
Speaker 1: not so good or even embarrassing parts.
Speaker 4: It's like talking about the greatest beer pong game you
Speaker 4: ever played. You're like, yeah, it's great. Well did you vomit? Yeah,
Speaker 4: I vomited, but it was still great.
Speaker 1: Or like, when we get back from the break, we'll
Speaker 1: look in more detail at why we tend to distort
Speaker 1: the past so badly, or, to paraphrase Rob, how it
Speaker 1: is that our brains get all the great beer pong
Speaker 1: of the past without any of the vomit. When the
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab returns, we'll see that our rosy, redemptive view
Speaker 1: of the past stems from an unfortunate design feature of
Speaker 1: our minds, one that comes with a huge happiness cost
Speaker 1: that we don't often recognize. We'll learn that what seems
Speaker 1: like a harmless bit of rosy nostalgia can sometimes cause
Speaker 1: us to make bad decisions in the present. The Happiness
Speaker 1: Lab will be back in a moment.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's nothing like being on a bike and
Speaker 3: suffering with people, rejoicing with people you know. To me,
Speaker 3: it's real shared experience.
Speaker 1: This is Lee Thompson, a professor at the Kellogg School
Speaker 1: of Management at Northwestern University. She's an expert on the
Speaker 1: ways that our memories can play tricks on us. But
Speaker 1: Lee is also a world champion cyclist. She took up
Speaker 1: the sport late in life encouraged by a very devoted teacher,
Speaker 1: her fiance Bob.
Speaker 3: You know, he was a cyclist, and you know, my
Speaker 3: response was like any normal person's response who doesn't run bike,
Speaker 3: which is, well, anybody can ride a bike, Like what's
Speaker 3: the big deal. But then he said, well, do you
Speaker 3: know what it's like to go twenty five miles an
Speaker 3: hour on a bike? And can you do that for
Speaker 3: an hour? And it's like, okay, Well, is this a
Speaker 3: challenge or what?
Speaker 1: And Lee was up for that challenge. After she and
Speaker 1: Bob got married, they headed not for a beach vacation honeymoon,
Speaker 1: but for the San Juan Islands and day long, grueling
Speaker 1: bike rides.
Speaker 3: I didn't know that my husband's secret plan was to
Speaker 3: get me to ride up Mount Constitution. If I would
Speaker 3: have read anything about that, I think I would have
Speaker 3: freaked myself out, said are you kidding me? There's no
Speaker 3: way we're doing this. But it was only when we
Speaker 3: were like a quarter of the way up that he
Speaker 3: said this is going to be a pretty serious climb.
Speaker 3: But by that time I was already kind of one
Speaker 3: quarter into it.
Speaker 1: A painful bike ride that's so steep you don't even
Speaker 1: think you can finish it. That doesn't sound like most
Speaker 1: people's idea of a good honeymoon, but Lee gets nostalgic
Speaker 1: whenever she thinks about it.
Speaker 3: There's one time in my life where I could go
Speaker 3: back to. It would probably be that because it was
Speaker 3: just epic, you know, epic fun. But I know enough
Speaker 3: as a psychologist in my own research to know that
Speaker 3: on any given day, there was a sunburn, there wasn't
Speaker 3: enough food, somebody ran out of water, so not every
Speaker 3: moment was gloriously.
Speaker 1: Recognizes that our minds lie to us, and one of
Speaker 1: our mind's biggest misconceptions is that our recollections of the
Speaker 1: past are totally accurate.
Speaker 3: Our memories are pretty fallible. That seems like a judgy word,
Speaker 3: but our memories are not necessarily like a video recorder.
Speaker 1: Human memory doesn't have the hard drive space to videotape
Speaker 1: life in its entirety, so our brains play fast and
Speaker 1: loose with the footage. The first thing we do is
Speaker 1: delete most of the boring parts. The half hour of
Speaker 1: your vacation that you spent in traffic, or the part
Speaker 1: where you had to wait for dinner to sh show up,
Speaker 1: or the ten minutes you spent going through airport security,
Speaker 1: all those filler moments get dropped. But dropping those boring
Speaker 1: bits means that our memories are skewed in a very
Speaker 1: systematic way. The path seems to have a higher ratio
Speaker 1: of interesting moments to boring stuff than real life does.
Speaker 1: But that's not the only way our minds are biased.
Speaker 1: Our brains also don't like to recall the bad stuff,
Speaker 1: the sunburns and the rainy beach days and lost luggage,
Speaker 1: and so our brains cook the data. Lee has argued
Speaker 1: that we simply tend to forget the parts of an
Speaker 1: event that weren't positive.
Speaker 3: For example, I know on my honeymoon there was a
Speaker 3: day where both of us didn't wear sunscreen and there
Speaker 3: were very, very uncomfortable burns. I choose not to dwell
Speaker 3: on that. I choose not to make that the most
Speaker 3: important aspect. But anybody who's had a pretty bad sunburn
Speaker 3: knows that can be a deal breaker as far as
Speaker 3: your ability to enjoy the rest of the vacation.
Speaker 1: Our minds are also want to be movie directors. They
Speaker 1: really like a good story, the kind that has a
Speaker 1: happy ending, and that means that our brains unconsciously rewrite
Speaker 1: past events so that they seem more entertaining. That sunset
Speaker 1: becomes even more beautiful, that fish we caught becomes not
Speaker 1: just reasonably sized, but really really huge. That beer pond
Speaker 1: game becomes more fun and less vomit filled. And when
Speaker 1: we do manage to remember those annoying moments, they somehow
Speaker 1: magically transform into life lessons that provide a nice narrative arc.
Speaker 3: So what was an absolute disaster trip could turn out
Speaker 3: to be a hilarious story after the fact, kind of like, oh,
Speaker 3: look at me, I managed to survive. That's kind of
Speaker 3: an extreme example of what we call story construction or
Speaker 3: sense making. It becomes kind of a funny story to tell.
Speaker 1: After all these edits, our memories are no longer accurate
Speaker 1: recordings of real life events. They're unconsciously spin doctored highlight reels.
Speaker 1: It's a bias that Lee and her college have referred
Speaker 1: to as rosie retrospection.
Speaker 3: Which technically means that our memory for this bounded event
Speaker 3: in time is a lot more favorable and positive and
Speaker 3: fulfilling than was the actual experience of the event itself.
Speaker 1: But rosie retrospections aren't just memories we think back on passively.
Speaker 1: We also use them to predict what we will enjoy
Speaker 1: and will enjoy in the future, and that leads to
Speaker 1: a second bias, what Lee and her colleagues call Rosie prospection.
Speaker 1: When we think about a future event, like a dinner
Speaker 1: with friends or a vacation, we predict that it's going
Speaker 1: to be great, just like similar events are in our
Speaker 1: biased positive memories.
Speaker 3: Anticipating that event, I probably wouldn't be thinking about the
Speaker 3: stress of going through an international airport and the stress
Speaker 3: of I don't know, packing or not getting my bag.
Speaker 3: I'd just be thinking about, Oh, the arrival and the
Speaker 3: perfect weather.
Speaker 1: The idea of rosie prospection and retrospection fit well with
Speaker 1: what Lee experienced in her own honeymoon, but did Lee's
Speaker 1: hypothesis match what real people actually experience. Lee wanted to
Speaker 1: test this empirically, but she had to locate a pretty
Speaker 1: special population of subjects. She had to find a group
Speaker 1: of people who were about to undergo a positive experience
Speaker 1: in their lives, some sort of event that would make
Speaker 1: for a good memory. But those people also had to
Speaker 1: be willing to fill out a bunch of boring surveys
Speaker 1: during the event. What Lee didn't realize at the time
Speaker 1: was that her scientific solution to these problems would come,
Speaker 1: oddly enough, from the biking world. Her colleague Randy Kront
Speaker 1: was organizing a bike trip down the coast of California
Speaker 1: for his students, and.
Speaker 3: So we thought, oh my gosh, this is fantastic, gets
Speaker 3: like our perfect dream study.
Speaker 1: Lee first had the students predict how much they'd enjoy
Speaker 1: the bike trip before it started. They were asked, how
Speaker 1: much do you agree with these statements, I'm going to
Speaker 1: enjoy this trip, I'm going to think this vacation is fun,
Speaker 1: I'm going to feel good during this trip, and so on.
Speaker 1: Subjects were also asked the same questions again when they
Speaker 1: were on the trip itself and after the trip, when
Speaker 1: they were on their flight back home. So what did
Speaker 1: we find? Well before the bike trip, subjects thought their
Speaker 1: enjoyment would be at a twenty seven out of twenty
Speaker 1: eight total points on Lee's measure. They thought the trip
Speaker 1: was going to be awesome, But by the second day,
Speaker 1: subject had dropped to only a twenty out of twenty eight.
Speaker 1: The biker's enjoyment stayed lower than they had initially predicted
Speaker 1: for the entire week. But what happened a single day
Speaker 1: after the bike tour ended, subjects remembered their trip much
Speaker 1: better than it was. They said their experience was a
Speaker 1: twenty six out of twenty eight. On average, the biker's
Speaker 1: final post trip rating was higher than their enjoyment had
Speaker 1: actually been at any single point during the trip. Now
Speaker 1: that the trip was over, it was awesome when.
Speaker 3: You ask people, Oh, you have this event coming up,
Speaker 3: how are you feeling. Oh my gosh, it's going to
Speaker 3: be fantastic. I'm so excited. This is going to be
Speaker 3: so pleasureful. And then during the event, Ugh, my socks
Speaker 3: are wet. I forgot to bring mosquito repellent, you know,
Speaker 3: like so yucky. You know, the food they ran out
Speaker 3: of whatever. So there's a dampening as we called it,
Speaker 3: during the event. And then after the event, boom, all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, the rosy retrospection kicks in, where people
Speaker 3: are remembering the event as much more pleasureful than they
Speaker 3: reported during the event itself.
Speaker 1: Now, at first glance, the positive biases Lee identified may
Speaker 1: seem like a great design feature of the mind. Rosy
Speaker 1: retrospection allows our memory banks to be filled with extra positive,
Speaker 1: less boring recordings of the past and Remembering all those
Speaker 1: positively edited memories makes us feel happier, less lonely, and
Speaker 1: even more redeemed in the present. All good stuff, really,
Speaker 1: but Lee's research also reveals a major dark side to
Speaker 1: these biases are positively skewed. Recollections aren't just passive recordings
Speaker 1: that we go back to when we're feeling nostalgic. We
Speaker 1: also use our memories in the present to make predictions
Speaker 1: about how we ought to be spending our time. So
Speaker 1: if our overly rosy memories are getting our past realities
Speaker 1: really wrong, what does that mean for the accuracy with
Speaker 1: which we're making the decisions of today.
Speaker 3: I remember distinctly having the time of my life at
Speaker 3: I don't know, what do you call, kind of small
Speaker 3: town kind of carnival things that you go to at night.
Speaker 3: They have these like rides and you'd eat cotton candy,
Speaker 3: and I just remember thinking, this is my thing. I
Speaker 3: want to go do that.
Speaker 1: Even though she's a world expert on memory biases, Lee
Speaker 1: still sometimes falls prey to the problems of her own nostalgia.
Speaker 3: Well, I made the mistake of doing that not so
Speaker 3: long ago, and I was dizzy. I got a migraine headache,
Speaker 3: the cotton candy, Oh, was terrible? Like, how does anybody
Speaker 3: eat that stuff?
Speaker 1: Lee naturally assume that her fond memories of carnivals would
Speaker 1: accurately predict how positively her present self would feel if
Speaker 1: she jumped on a roller coaster or took that first
Speaker 1: plight of cotton candy. She assumed all the great things
Speaker 1: she remembered about fares of the past would feel just
Speaker 1: as good today as they seemed in her nostalgic memories.
Speaker 1: But Lee's overly glossy memories of the past wound up
Speaker 1: reducing her current happiness and making her a little nauseous.
Speaker 1: Constantly rewriting the past in a favorable light may make
Speaker 1: us happier when we look back, but it also means
Speaker 1: we don't correctly adjust to the demands of the future.
Speaker 1: For instance, focusing on the highlights of a marriage or
Speaker 1: a job might cause us to stay in relationships or
Speaker 1: work environments that aren't good for us, where the bad
Speaker 1: times in reality outweigh the good. But it's not just
Speaker 1: our personal choices that are led astray by our biased memories.
Speaker 1: When we get back from the break, we'll see that
Speaker 1: there are also societal costs to all these rosy retrospections,
Speaker 1: ones that can be used against us when we least expected.
Speaker 3: America proud again.
Speaker 1: We will make America safe again, and yes.
Speaker 3: Together we will make America great again.
Speaker 1: We'll explore this dark side of nostalgia when the happiness
Speaker 1: lab returns in a moment.
Speaker 5: I'm from Columbia and that's where I grew up until
Speaker 5: I moved to the States eighteen years ago.
Speaker 1: Nostalgia expert Felipe de Bregard's immigrant experience explains why he
Speaker 1: relates so much to one of his favorite literary heroes,
Speaker 1: Juve and al Orbino, a character in Gabriel Garcia Marcus's
Speaker 1: famous book Love in the Time of Cholera. Like Felipe
Speaker 1: woven All made the tough decision to leave Columbia to
Speaker 1: study abroad, But unlike Felipe woven All's ignorance of his
Speaker 1: own rosy retrospections never let him properly process that decision.
Speaker 5: When he's in Paris, he phillips extraordinary nostalgic about going
Speaker 5: back to his hometown, and he wants to go back,
Speaker 5: doesn't he enjoyed party is And then when he goes
Speaker 5: back he's not happy. He's like this is not at
Speaker 5: all how I imagine it right.
Speaker 1: Our rosie retrospections mean that we spend the present constantly
Speaker 1: wishing we could go back to what it was like
Speaker 1: in the past. But in the rare cases where those
Speaker 1: wishes come true, as they did for Uvenol, we usually
Speaker 1: find that those past situations aren't as good as we
Speaker 1: Rosalie remembered to steal the eloquent words of Garcia Marquez.
Speaker 1: We become easy victims to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.
Speaker 1: But the fact that our nostalgic tendencies are so easily
Speaker 1: deceived also makes us easy marks for people who might
Speaker 1: want to exploit a rosier past. Human minds are so
Speaker 1: prone to rosy retrospection that it's really simple to feed
Speaker 1: us a good story about what things were like back
Speaker 1: in the day. Some imagine utopia that was better then
Speaker 1: than it is now, which is why so many political
Speaker 1: movements are keen to convince us that everything in life
Speaker 1: would be peachy if we could just return to the
Speaker 1: good old days.
Speaker 5: That was the whole Trump campaign right, make America great Again,
Speaker 5: and that again was clearly an indication that it was
Speaker 5: good before and that we should strive to do something
Speaker 5: like in the past.
Speaker 1: Felipe saw just this pattern in his own country's right
Speaker 1: wing propaganda, and it attempts to end decades of political violence.
Speaker 5: I left Columbia very unhappy with the political situation. Some
Speaker 5: of the most horrible acts ever committed by a government
Speaker 5: I think in Colombia happened during that time. But what
Speaker 5: is very surprising to me is that, you know, many
Speaker 5: of the people that voted against the peace process had
Speaker 5: an extraordinarily distorted view of how the past was, so
Speaker 5: they were hoping to sort of go back to a
Speaker 5: kind of life that never occurred in Colombia. Never this
Speaker 5: situation again in which nostalgia is a very bad motivator.
Speaker 1: And that's because the science shows that we don't just
Speaker 1: experience nostalgia for a past that we actually experienced. Our
Speaker 1: memories are so biased that we sometimes experienced nostalgia for
Speaker 1: a past that never even occurred. For one the only
Speaker 1: imagined happening.
Speaker 5: You go like, Holy Molly, I would be so much
Speaker 5: better off if I was in that imagined situation that
Speaker 5: I never leave. I never experienced, but I am very
Speaker 5: capable of mentally simulating relative to this state that I
Speaker 5: am mean right now. It is the worst possible way
Speaker 5: of going about making decisions.
Speaker 1: So how can we protect ourselves from the nefarious parts
Speaker 1: of nostalgia? How can we get the benefits of our
Speaker 1: rosy past without all those biased memories hurting our current decisions.
Speaker 1: Felipe thinks one path forward is to pay attention to
Speaker 1: why we're turning to the past in the first place.
Speaker 1: What do our memories tell us we're missing in the present.
Speaker 5: You might think that what you want is to go
Speaker 5: back to high school, but really what is going to
Speaker 5: satisfy the desire is to get new friends.
Speaker 1: But there's also a second way to avoid the problems
Speaker 1: of nostalgia.
Speaker 5: The funny thing is that it seems kind of contrituitive,
Speaker 5: because what I think we should do is to improve
Speaker 5: our memory of the past. We need historians really helping
Speaker 5: us dispel the delutions that nostalia create. I think universities
Speaker 5: should hire historians. I think podcasters should interview historians. The
Speaker 5: best way to sort of minimize the distortions of nostalgia
Speaker 5: is to actually improve our memory.
Speaker 1: As I heard more, Felip based strategies for preventing the
Speaker 1: problems of rosie retrospection I realized I needed to talk
Speaker 1: to someone who had special insight into how to use
Speaker 1: our fond memories productively. Not a historian or scholar, but
Speaker 1: someone whose entire career could have been defined by the past,
Speaker 1: but wasn't my eighties idol Rob Low.
Speaker 4: Listen, I love the eighties as much as the next guy.
Speaker 4: But when people come up to me, the thing that
Speaker 4: I'm most proud of in all my career is that
Speaker 4: I never know what they're going to want to talk about.
Speaker 4: I love that I'm not anchored to any one era,
Speaker 4: or to any one TV show, or to any one movie.
Speaker 4: The eighties is merely a fantastic chapter that a lot
Speaker 4: of people like, including me.
Speaker 1: Unlike many stars from the eighties, Rob managed not to
Speaker 1: get stuck there. Despite the fact that Rob is himself
Speaker 1: very nostalgic, and the fact that he is, for me
Speaker 1: at least, the absolute epitome of eighties nostalgia, He's seamlessly
Speaker 1: managed to move beyond that decade. Nearly all of Rob's
Speaker 1: biggest successes in movies and TV, as an author, and
Speaker 1: now even in podcasting with his new show, Literally with
Speaker 1: Rob Low, They've all come since the eighties for self
Speaker 1: proclaimed lover of nostalgia, Rob hasn't let his rosy retrospection
Speaker 1: affect his present success or his current happiness.
Speaker 4: One of my greatest fears was always being a one
Speaker 4: hit wonder. Four decades in, I still wake up and go,
Speaker 4: am I one head wonder?
Speaker 1: So what's Rob's secret? Well, even though he's not a psychologist,
Speaker 1: Rob seems to have an intuitive sense that our memories
Speaker 1: are more fallible than we realize. His unique cultural seat
Speaker 1: in the eighties has made him all too aware that
Speaker 1: we sometimes celebrate parts of the past that were at
Speaker 1: the time kind of sucky.
Speaker 4: So in the eighties, everybody shit all over the music.
Speaker 4: It seems shocking now, but like when did journeys Can't
Speaker 4: Stop Believing become the national anthem? Because I remember the
Speaker 4: eighties and people laughed at Journey. They thought they were
Speaker 4: a cheesy, hack rock band. Now that's every college campus
Speaker 4: frat party. Raise your beer, start crying and dancing song.
Speaker 4: It's the end of the Sopranos. If you'd have told
Speaker 4: me in nineteen eighty four that that was the song,
Speaker 4: I would have said, no way.
Speaker 1: Well, it's easy for all of us to misremember the past.
Speaker 1: That's a luxury that people who've lived in the public
Speaker 1: eye don't always have. Rob's problems with substance addiction and
Speaker 1: sex scandals are common knowledge, and that means that Rob
Speaker 1: has had to be on with himself about the harmful
Speaker 1: actions he engaged in as a young man. It's made
Speaker 1: him penitent and more clear eyed about the past. Rob's
Speaker 1: also gotten a newfound perspective on the challenges of teenage
Speaker 1: life as a father to his own boys, Matthew and John.
Speaker 1: Rob's kids never became huge teen movie stars like their dad.
Speaker 1: Watching Matthew and John grow up with more run of
Speaker 1: the mill adolescent milestones has made Rob realize just how
Speaker 1: odd his own experience was.
Speaker 4: My son is eighteen, Okay, so now he's world famous.
Speaker 4: That kid right there, eighteen world famous, and it just
Speaker 4: takes my breath away. I'm like, I wouldn't wish that
Speaker 4: on that eighteen year old kid. He's never home, he's
Speaker 4: on the road, he's making tons of money, and it's like,
Speaker 4: I can't believe it happened to me.
Speaker 1: But Rob's biggest insight comes from something we talk about
Speaker 1: a lot on this podcast. To be fully happy, we
Speaker 1: need to get out of the past long enough to
Speaker 1: make the most of the present moment. When you think
Speaker 1: about happiness, do you think it's more about looking back
Speaker 1: looking forward, a combination of both, Like how do you
Speaker 1: think about it in your own life?
Speaker 4: It's not looking forward and not looking back. Although we've
Speaker 4: been talking about nostalgia, which doesn't make me happy, obviously,
Speaker 4: really happy, true happiness is being present in this moment
Speaker 4: and your mind's not telling you, hey, you know what
Speaker 4: you should really be doing, you should be doing X,
Speaker 4: Y and Z, or hey, you know you should really
Speaker 4: go back. None of that. That monkey brain part of
Speaker 4: yourself is shut off, and you are fully present in
Speaker 4: whatever you were doing and content with that. That is
Speaker 4: the definition of true happiness for me.
Speaker 1: This insight into the importance of making sure he's living
Speaker 1: in the present moment came from one of the hardest
Speaker 1: won battles of Rob's life.
Speaker 4: I've been sober now thirty years and it's you know,
Speaker 4: it changed my life, and one of the big tenets
Speaker 4: of recovery is learning to live in the now and
Speaker 4: learning to be happy with what's in front of you.
Speaker 4: To the extent that I'm able to do that on
Speaker 4: a daily basis is a direct correlation to how happy
Speaker 4: I am at any given time.
Speaker 1: Nostalgia can be a pleasant experience, but our memories of
Speaker 1: the past can also hurt our present selves if we're
Speaker 1: not careful. But when we take a present focus, when
Speaker 1: we learn to be content with what's in front of us,
Speaker 1: when we recognize that we want to remember what's going
Speaker 1: on in the here and now as happily as possible,
Speaker 1: we can avoid the problems that come with an extra
Speaker 1: rosy retrospection. Rob's living proof that understanding our mind's biases
Speaker 1: can help us appreciate our past and even dig into
Speaker 1: all that yummy and psychologically beneficial nostalgia without the drawbacks.
Speaker 1: When we notice what we're longing for in the past,
Speaker 1: we can choose not to go backwards, but decide how
Speaker 1: to move forward in the future. Rob taught me that
Speaker 1: an accurate sense of the pros and cons of the
Speaker 1: past can be a helpful way to enjoy and make
Speaker 1: the most of the present, which was really good news
Speaker 1: for me because I really really wasn't ready to throw
Speaker 1: away my eighties playlist just yet. In fact, after chatting
Speaker 1: with Rob, I think it's time for a long classic
Speaker 1: eighties movie marathon and maybe some cheesy music videos because
Speaker 1: I definitely still want my MTV