Addicted to Nostalgia 🎶

 

My mother recently handed me a small archive of my modeling work from the late 1980s: a Jordache jeans campaign and photographs from Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” music video. She has held onto my photos and artefacts for years. Moms are cool like that. 

Nostalgia rocks our brains 🧠 🎶 

Nostalgia is more than looking backward. Brain-imaging research shows that nostalgic experiences engage the hippocampus, which supports autobiographical memory, alongside reward regions including the ventral striatum and the dopamine-producing substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area. 

According to experts in this field, the stronger the coordination between memory and reward systems, the stronger a person’s reported experience of nostalgia. 

Regions associated with self-reflection also participate, which may explain why an old photograph can recover a whole lot more than an event. It can recover our former sense of self.

Researchers propose that when a personally significant memory is recalled and experienced as rewarding, the association between the memory and its emotional value may be reinforced. 

That remains a developing model rather than a settled account, but it offers a compelling explanation for nostalgia’s peculiar force: remembering can renew our connection to the person who originally lived the memory.

If you have an archive of photos from last year or decades ago, consider this a prompt: consult with your family archivist — unless you’re the archivist, in which case consult with yourself — and pull out some old photos for yourself or someone else. Might as well spread the dopamine-producing (feel-good) neurotransmitters! 🤩 

For those who want to read more: 

The principal research is the study of hippocampal-reward-system coactivation during nostalgia and a later review developing the broader neural model. Oba et al., ⁠Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience⁠; Yang et al., ⁠Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience⁠.