Instant Genius - The psychology and neuroscience of nostalgia

Episode Date: April 28, 2024

Whether they’re triggered by looking through old family photographs, hearing a piece of music you haven’t heard for years or eating a favourite childhood snack, feelings of nostalgia often come flooding into our hearts and minds. But what is going on in our brains when we have these feelings? In this episode I catch up with writer and historian Dr Agnes Arnold-Forster a writer, author of the new book Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion. She tells us how this intriguing emotion has gone from being thought of as a deadly disease to being used as a therapy to treat degenerative cognitive conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Name audio.com to learn more. Hello, and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Each week, you'll hear world-leading experts and scientists talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. Whether they're triggered by looking through old family photographs, hearing a piece of music you haven't heard for years, or eating a favorite childhood snack, feelings of nostalgia often come flooding into our hearts and minds.

But what's going on in our brains when we have these feelings? In this episode, I catch up with writer and historian Dr. Agnes Arnold Forster, author of the new book, Nostalgia, A History of a Dangerous Emotion. She tells us how this intriguing emotion has gone from being thought of as a deadly disease to being used as a therapy to treat degenerative cognitive conditions. So first off, what do we mean when we say we're feeling nostalgic? You know, what does that feel like? I think generally nostalgia is, well, we usually refer to it as a bittersweet feeling.

So it's a kind of fond reflection on the past, some moment in our own history or indeed a history that we haven't experienced. And it feels good. It's a nice feeling. But it also has the kind of tinge of sadness to it, a bit of longing, wistfulness, a kind of mix of good and bad. So one interesting thing that you mentioned in the book is different words that different words that different. different countries or cultures have for this, like the Portuguese Saudade. So I'm actually a classical guitarist, so quite often pieces are called that like Prelude Saudade or whatever. I also used to live in Japan and they have one, Natsukashi. I don't know if you've

come across that. It differs slightly in its definition from our word nostalgia. There's no direct equivalent. So is that a common thing? Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things that's interesting about emotions generally and nostalgia specifically is. is that it can be tempting to think of them as universal, a cultural constants, as things that are experienced and felt the same worldwide. But I think that the variation in language that we're just talking about indicates that perhaps there might be a different inexperience

as well as just terminology. So that, say, if you're Portuguese, you might feel that wistfulness slightly differently to if you're English because you've grown up in a different culture, a different community, you have a different language for the emotions you're feeling. But yeah, it's hard to know. So going down into a sort of more personal level then,

do some people tend to feel it more keenly? And is that linked to any particular personality traits? So if you ask psychologists today, most of them will say that everyone feels nostalgic, regardless of their personality type, their age, their inclination. It's something that is universal. It's incredibly common. So everyone will not only feel nostalgic,

but feel nostalgia really regularly. But there are other studies that suggest that older people are more likely to be nostalgic than younger people, which kind of makes sense that you're, as you get older, you have more to look back on, more to leave behind. And there are some researchers that think that nostalgia is tied to a fear of mortality or, you know, a fear of death. That as you get closer to the end of your life, you feel more nostalgic about the life you've left behind. But the jury is still out, I suppose. So the sort of attitudes we've had towards it have changed a great deal over the years. And one thing that I thought was interesting, at one point it was viewed as a type of sickness that you could even die of. Yeah, for most of nostalgia's history, it was in fact a sickness that could kill you.

So it was first coined in 1888 by a Swiss physician. And he defined it not just as a sickness, but as a sickness associated with place. So while nostalgia is about time, his version of nostalgia was a kind of pathological homesickness. And that was the definition that nostalgia held until the beginning of the 20th century, so for hundreds of years. And it was something that appeared on people's death certificates, physicians, doctors wrote about it all the time. And it was seen as something that posed a particular threat to people. So it was something that people really worried about. So not just a kind of, you know, benign, fond feeling like it is now, but something that really

had the capacity to do serious harm. So how has our knowledge of what nostalgia is from a psychological standpoint, changed since then, you know, what do we know now? I mean, it's changed radically. That version of nostalgia is very different to the one we know and love today. And it's even changed across the 20th century, like at the beginning of the 20th century when nostalgia first stopped being a disease. It was still a kind of defect or a kind of troublesome personality trait. So it's something that indicated that the person was perhaps a bit regressive or childlike, infantile. And now, psychologists think of it as something that everyone experiences. It doesn't indicate anything wrong with anyone. And even now, some psychologists, or many psychologists in fact, think that nostalgia

is completely transformed. It used to be something that killed you. And now it is something that can actually make you better, that it can be used in therapy. It can have this, like, positive, emotional impact or effect on people's lives. And so I think that's a kind of amazing thing about nostalgia. It's done a complete 180. It used to be deadly and now it's helpful. Yeah, so coming off the back of that, are there any sort of theories that nostalgia could serve an evolutionary purpose? Like there, you mentioned sort of an emotional armour. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things about nostalgia now is that it is seen as a social emotion.

So mostly when people feel nostalgic about their own histories, their own pasts, they're nostalgic for times when they've been with other people. Some psychologists refer to this as when people feel nostalgic, their memories are peopled. So their memories are populated by the people they know and love. And so the evolutionary purpose of nostalgia, some people think, is that it helps us feel connected and bonded with each other, that it makes you feel good about memories you have of time spent with your loved ones, with your friends and family. And, you know, humans are very social animals. And we need nostalgia, or so it goes, because it helps us feel connected to one another.

And it builds those social bonds that are really fundamental to making human society work. So has it been more prevalent in some time periods than others? And can we say why? Yeah, it's very tempting to think of certain times as being particularly nostalgic eras in history. Like there's always seems to be some sort of think piece that says, oh, well, now we're living through a peculiarly nostalgic time. And we blame nostalgia for all sorts of big political moments or big cultural phenomena.

But actually, if you look at the history of nostalgia, at least the recent history of nostalgia, nostalgia does seem to be pretty consistent. And actually, we're just very good at noticing when nostalgia is around. So every so often someone will write a headline and say, well, now's a peculiarly nostalgic time. But that same headline has been written pretty much every decade or every five years for the last 50 years. We just forget, which is, you know, I suppose quite funny.

So you sort of touched on this earlier, but let's look at the possibility of somebody feeling nostalgic for something that they've never actually directly experienced. I think that's really interesting. So say somebody's grown up in city council block or something, tower block, and they really want to live in a cottage, or say people who like to do battle reenactment and things like that. Do we know what's going on there?

Yeah, so there's lots of theories, and I think that that kind of nostalgia can be so seductive, and it's the kind of nostalgia that I think I personally feel the most, and it's the kind of nostalgia that got me into being a historian. But I think that the thing that's appealing about that is that that sort of play acting, that kind of fantasy like reenactments or people who like to dress up in old-fashioned clothes or go to kind of immersive history experiences, they allow you to kind of step away from your ordinary and maybe quite mundane or boring life and live in this sort of alternative reality that is there's much more sort of fluidity to it. You can kind of do whatever you like. There's a great interview with a medieval reenactor. in America who's like, well, no one ever, you know, play acts or reenacts a peasant or a, you know, they're all lords and ladies and knights, you know, it allows you, you know, if you're an IT manager or a dustbin collector or whatever, I mean, maybe you love your jobs, but you also

get to use the past to kind of be a different kind of person and pretend and, you know, and everyone loves play. Like that's something that, you know, people enjoy doing. And this is one way of playing. comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My

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collective nostalgia. So can you explain the difference there, please? Yeah, so private nostalgia is the kind of stuff we've been talking about, both in terms of like your nostalgia for your own childhood, say, but also nostalgia for, you know, a historical moment. Collective nostalgia is the nostalgia that is cultivated, evoked, shared by people through ritual or kind of some sort of shared cultural moment. And I think a great example of that is in 2012, there was the London Olympic Games and there was the opening ceremony, which was directed by Danny Boyle. And one of the things that he did was do a big kind of big pageantry moment about the foundation of the NHS. And that was the kind of moment of collective nostalgia. Lots of people watched it at the same time.

lots of people felt, you know, were kind of called to reflect on this moment, whether they'd lived through it or not. And it was deliberately cultivated. I mean, not cynically necessarily, but like he wanted to make everyone feel a sense of nostalgia, of collective belonging. And it can be more, I suppose, malign as well. But generally speaking, these sorts of moments of collective nostalgia bring together whole nations or whole communities.

And they allow people to feel a sense of connection. and shared history with people that they never met, and they might not actually have anything else in common with. But nonetheless, they feel kind of, you know, we all feel the same way about this particular moment in time. So moving on from that, let's have a look at the manipulation of people, if that's the right word, using nostalgia by things like the advertising industry or political parties. You know, why do we find that so appealing and so persuasive? Well, it's a great trick for advertising companies and for politicians, because as we've talked about, everyone feels nostalgic.

And so it's an incredibly easy emotion to use in whatever it is that you want to do. And advertising agencies cottoned onto this, you know, as early as the 1970s. If you look at TV adverts from then, they were already getting people to reflect on the good old days of X, Y, Z, you know, whatever it may be that they were trying to sell. And they realized it worked. And so they kept doing it. And we still do it now all the time. And you also see it in things like reruns of popular TV shows or remun. makes of films. Nostalgia is very powerful because not only does it capture an audience that

saw something or experienced something the first time round, it's a kind of guaranteed sale, basically, because you can be sure that someone is going to feel nostalgic in response to the thing that you've made. And, you know, we can be critical of advertising agencies and, you know, commercial enterprises, but it's also used, as you say, by politicians, most famously, by people like Donald Trump. You know, Make America Great Again is the kind of quintessential, nostalgic bit of political spin. And the thing that's so effective about that is that it's very vague. He's not often very precise about the America of the past.

He wants to resurrect. And that means that it can be meaningful to all sorts of people who actually have very different opinions or different experiences or different life histories. They can all say, okay, yeah, I want America to be great again because my version of the America that I remember is this, and he's going to bring that back for me. And that I think is what's so kind of clever about it. It is incredibly effective because of its capaciousness, its flexibility.

It can mean all sorts of things to all sorts of people. So let's have a look at how feelings of nostalgia are triggered in people then. So a lot of people, if you mention this, they'll probably mention Marcel Proust or something like that. What do we know about what's going on in these situations? Yeah, so there's been loads of studies on nostalgia recently that connect nostalgia to taste and smell. So some studies of nostalgia will do MRI scans of the brain or other kinds of scans of the brain and try and evoke nostalgia in the person being scanned. And sometimes they'll do that by showing them photographs or talking about moments in the past,

but often they'll use smell or they'll use flavors. And we know that those are very effective mechanisms for evoking nostalgia, partly because the bits of the brain that in the book I call the nostalgic brain, other people have called it that too, are very close to the olfactory bits of the brain. And so the thing that's interesting about them as well is that it can feel like you are having a nostalgic memory that is kind of forced upon you, that you don't choose to evoke it. You're not sitting there and having a kind of cognitive moment where you're reading a story and you're thinking, oh, I remember this. I can now, like, transport myself back and then I feel certain things about it. But with smell, it kind of comes flooding through your brain unbidden, or that's how it feels anyway.

And so that can be the most kind of intense and kind of lasting feelings of nostalgia that we can bring about in people. And yeah, it's interesting because it's kind of hard to predict both what's going to be a nostalgic smell and it's going to be very individual. But also it's going to be hard to predict what memories are evoked by different smells or tastes. And so it's a bit of a kind of unwieldy scientific beast, but a very interesting one. So you mentioned MRI scanners there. So what have they taught us about what's going on in our brains when we experience nostalgia? So scientists in the 19th century, like the first psychologist, the first neuroscientists, thought that perhaps there was just one bit of the brain that was responsible for nostalgia.

And they thought that maybe there was just one bit of the brain that was responsible for all of the basic emotions, like anger, fear, joy, sadness. But more recently, studies have shown that actually it's a network of bits of the brain, so lots of different bits of the brain that work together to bring about nostalgic feelings. there's the bits related to autobiographic memory, the reward system, which is why it feels so nice. It kind of is associated with the positive emotion. And the thing that's interesting about that, though, is that it's contested science. So while there are lots of people who think that this is absolutely the way that nostalgia specifically works, but also emotions in general work,

that, you know, you can scan anyone's brain, make them feel nostalgic with a picture or a smell, and the same bits of their brain will light up in every case. There are other psychologists and other researchers who take a slightly different view of how nostalgia works, but also how emotions in general work, and say that it's not something that's kind of hardwired into our neurotransmitters. It's not something that is the same for everyone, but actually that these emotions are socially constructed and historically contingent and dependent. A bit like when we were talking about before about the kind of languages of emotions that are, you know, different in different countries, that different communities, different cultures, will not only express their emotions differently, but maybe even feel their emotions differently. And so that if we did these studies on a truly global scale, we might find out something quite different about the way that our brains, different people's brains,

respond to the same feeling, or indeed that different people will have different feelings that they might refer to with the same language or different languages. And so it depends slightly on your point of view and who you want to row behind in behind in terms of whether you're keen on the kind of inherent biological model of emotions or if you're more keen on a kind of more constructivist or all sort of variable model of emotions. Personally, I fall into the second camp, maybe unsurprisingly as a historian, but yeah,

you know, it's up to you. So sort of coming off that then, one interesting point that you make about the way that we, or psychologists or scientists, have approached what's going on in our brains, very closely sort of mirrors the technology of the age. Is that right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I always think is true about the history of science is that you get a new toy, you get a new tool, and all the scientists are like, right, this is the thing that's going to explain to us how everything works. And MRI scanners are one of them, like they were invented in the 1970s and were used much more widely by the 1980s and 1990s. And so you have whole sort of schools of science that kind of fall in behind these new bits of technology and then use them to explain the world around them. And then you'll get other kind of bits of technology or other kind of trends or fashions and people fall in behind those after that. And so it's one of the things that I find most interesting about looking at the history of science is that, you know, what we find convincing right now might be more about what technologies are being used or kind of are fashionable and less about what is necessarily, you know, true about the world around us or our own bodies.

So we mentioned a bit back the therapeutical applications of nostalgia. And I think this is particularly well known in the treatment of elderly people with degenerative brain disorders. So, you know, what do we know about how that works and how effective is it? Well, what we know is it's very effective. So older adults with things like dementia and Alzheimer's, we've used nostalgia for quite a while now to help manage those symptoms, improve memory, but also improve their psychological and emotional well-being and their sense of connectedness and belonging. And the reasons for this are many. One is that people tend to, if they have these degenerative conditions, retain better long-term memory as opposed to short-term

memory. And so, you know, getting someone to think about their childhood is often an effective way in to getting them to think with their memory, as it were, but also that because we know about nostalgia that it is this kind of peopled emotion, this social emotion, that by making people feel nostalgic, we can also make them feel more, especially if they are living alone or more solitary life than they have before in a care home, for example, then making them feel nostalgic can sort of remind them of their social connectedness of their friends and family of the communities they once lived in and make them feel more positive and happier. But we do know that that sort of effect of nostalgia isn't confined to people with dementia and Alzheimer's. We can also

use that therapeutic magic, as it were, in people of all ages. And researchers think that making people feel nostalgic can be a real positive psychological resource and make people feel less anxious, less depressed, more socially connected, less lonely, more optimistic, weirdly, which I always think is a kind of funny paradox that you make people feel nostalgic, but actually can make them feel more positive about the future. And also, even, and this is, I think, maybe one of the strangest ones, for me anyway, is it can make people more creative, like, be more productive, almost, more kind of constructive, which is kind of the opposite of how I think a lot of people think about nostalgia. I think lots of people think that nostalgia is kind of

stagnant or conservative, like small sea conservative or stultifying or somehow like regressive or retroactive. But actually studies show that it can make you creative, constructive, productive, think more positively about the future. Yeah, I think that's kind of strange and therefore very interesting. Yeah, you mentioned a few studies on this, which I thought were really interesting on creativity. Could you just tell us, you know, how those studies were carried out in what they found? Yeah, so the studies were that they got a sample of people. They made some of them nostalgic, some of them feel negative about the past,

and some of them feel neutral about the past. And they did this by getting people to read news stories about something that happened before. So things that were like positive, neutral and negative. And then they gave them creative writing tasks and found that using language processing and models they found that people who were made to feel nostalgic were more creative, had a greater kind of variance in plot and language and vocabulary and genre than the people who have either felt neutral about the past or felt more negative about the past. And these aren't, you know, massive studies,

but I think they're compelling enough to make us reconsider slightly some of the bad rep, I think, that nostalgia sometimes gets. So sort of as a final question, what do you think is coming up next in the nostalgia world, you know, nostalgia science, nostalgia research? Or what are you most looking forward to seeing? I think I would really like to see, because I think one of the things that's interesting about the stuff about advertising and marketing is that we know that a lot of people use it.

We know that a lot of companies make use of nostalgia in their commercial activities and trying to get people to buy things. But we don't actually know that much about, firstly, if it works and who it works on. And secondly, how it works, if it does work, you know, what is the kind of underlying mechanism that makes people not just, we know what makes people feel nostalgic, but what turns that nostalgic feeling into purchasing something or watching something into action. So I think that's an interesting kind of future area study. But I suppose one of the things I often say, or I have been saying about, since I wrote my book

about nostalgia, is that one of the maybe frustrating things about nostalgia is that a lot of this great work is being done by researchers and psychologists about like all of these positive things about nostalgia, these positive uses of nostalgia and these therapeutic use. of nostalgia. And yet a lot of it doesn't really cut through. I think it would be great if more people knew about this sort of the possibilities of potential of nostalgia. Because at the moment, most of the kind of public debate about nostalgia tends to be in that kind of more negative kind of space. And, you know, that's not that that's not important or interesting or true, but that I think nostalgia could do with a bit of an uplift in terms of what people know about it and

what people understand about it. And so I suppose that's not really so much research, but more kind of public understanding of science. But yeah, I'd like to see that. shift in the future, although I'm not that optimistic it will, but that would be nice. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr Agnes Arnold Forster. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out her latest book, Nostalgia, a history of a dangerous emotion. If you liked what you just heard, please consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now.

Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal,

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