Why do We Feel Nostalgic?
The Science Behind Musicās Nostalgic Power.
What is Nostalgia?
Nostalgia is a type of emotion that humans frequently experience. Nostalgia remained relegated to the realm of psychological disorders for much of the 20th century.
We can often experience nostalgia in unexpected places. You may have had the experience of driving down the highway turning on the radio, hearing a song you havenāt heard in ages. You get immediately transported back in time and dumped into this immersive memory. Something you havenāt thought about in ages that were very meaningful to you. Maybe wedding day or senior prom or birth of your first child or death of a loved one.
When we talk about nostalgia, there are a few theatres in which this story takes place: the past, the present, and the future. (Having a sense of longing or wistful affection for the past.)
The Science Behind Musicās Nostalgic Power
No matter how cool and sophisticated your tastes have become in the years since high school, the opening guitar riff of your fav song probably still has the power to automatically transport you back in time.
This is because music makes human beings incredibly nostalgic.
Neuroimaging has shown that songs stimulate many different areas of the brain, and give us a big hit of dopamine while theyāre at it.
Weāre very good at recognizing music that weāve heard recognizing associating it with certain memories. They call this period the reminiscence bump when human beings retain more memories than they will during any other life phase.
Nostalgia is a rich & bittersweet emotion intimately tied up with our autobiographical memories. Nostalgia is deeply woven into our sense of self; who are we at our most authentic selves. Music can serve as a powerful context cue for deep meaningful, intensely vivid nostalgic memories. By connecting us with our emotional histories, nostalgia can help us to stave off sadness, loneliness, existential threat, and even the imminence of death in the approaching horizon of our lives as we age.
Theories behind musicās nostalgic powers
Nostalgia is triggered automatically on cue (for example, by the smell of a particular dish, sudden activities, or a certain song).
Nostalgia is a happiness-related emotion, yet, at the same time, it is thought to invoke sadness because of the realization that some desirable aspects of the past are out of reach.
A similar view was endorsed by Werman, who proposed that nostalgia involves āwistful pleasure, a joy tinged with sadnessā.
Experiments behind musicās nostalgic powers
Trying to get a better understanding of how music may tap into nostalgia and what that may be doing in the brain, doctors began to work with computational models of music cognition.
One experiment that investigated how nostalgia affected brain activity was conducted at the University of Cagliari in Italy.
The study found that activating a certain area of the brain, increased positive and decreased negative emotions and all types of nostalgia. Evidence from this experiment suggests that there is a connection between nostalgia and positive affect.
Researchers have connected music-triggered nostalgia with increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is activated when we retrieve autobiographical memories
Tastes may also induce nostalgia in part because the neural pathways carrying information from the taste buds ultimately lead in part to the limbic system.
Another experiment where different models were applied to interrogate brain activity that was recorded while people were listening to nostalgia evoking and non-nostalgia evoking music.
They found that nostalgia was able to recruit a wide network of brain regions involved in multiple levels of different cognitive processes.
Non-nostalgic music recruited brain regions like Heschelās gyrus involved in basic auditory processing; Brocaās area involved in processing grammar and syntax not only in language but also in music.
Nostalgic music was able to recruit these brain regions and more brain regions such as the Substantia involved in reward processing or the anterior insulin involved in the visual experience of emotion or brain regions in the inferior frontal gyrus involved in autobiographical memories. It also recruited prefrontal frontal cingulate, insular parietal occipital, subcortical brain regions to span nearly all of our cognitive faculties.
It may explain why nostalgia can have such an outsized impact on us.