This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vittante. Depending on when you were born, you might have a special reaction to some of these songs. Chantissar, at least one of those songs evoked to feeling in you, a sort of fuzzy feeling, maybe a sense of longing. Maybe a memory popped up in your mind.
Most likely, what you're experiencing is nostalgia. We take it for granted that nostalgia is an ordinary, harmless emotion. Nobody thinks you should go to a therapist for posting a photo from your childhood with a hashtag throwback Thursday, or if you have a weak spot for fruit loops or lucky charms. But that's a relatively new way of thinking.
It started out very much as being considered a disease. And people even today, a lot of people say, well, I'm not nostalgic because I think about the future. Today on Hidden Brain, what exactly is nostalgia? And can nostalgia help us move forward in life, or does it simply leave us stuck in the past?
Clear Rucklidge is a psychology professor at North Dakota State University. He's the author of Nostalgia, a psychological resource. Clay, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you for having me.
In your book you describe the origin of the word nostalgia, you say that in the 17th century, a medical student noticed that Swiss soldiers fighting in the plains of Europe were experiencing a set of emotions and physical symptoms. Other physicians ran with this idea, and they thought nostalgia was a condition unique to Swiss soldiers. They believed that the endless clanging of cowbells in the Alps triggered some kind of trauma to the brain. Yeah, so there was a medical student named Joannes Hofer in the coined this term nostalgia, which he described as a cerebral disease of demonic cause that originated from continuous vibrations of animal spirits throughout the middle brain.
That's basically the beginning of the term nostalgia. Of course, that doesn't mean that was the first time people ever experienced it or even noticed it, but that was really the genesis of the study of nostalgia. So we've obviously come a long way since those early conceptions of nostalgia, and you say that some of the people who've led the way were not researchers, but marketers? Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that I think is really fascinating about this story, not just of what nostalgia is, but kind of the history of how people explored it is.
On the one hand, in the early years of scholarship on nostalgia, as we just discussed, there was this very disease-focused model. And then fast forward to the 1980s, which of course we're going from the late 1600s to the 1980s, and you see this more commercial-driven or marketing or advertisement-focused approach to nostalgia, which is a very difficult thing. And then we're going to be able to get the first approach to nostalgia, which of course would paint a completely different picture of nostalgia because marketers don't think that people buy products that make them miserable. They think people buy products that they enjoy and that make them happy.
Parents love to tell about when they were kids. It's all the nostalgia. I had a tons of truck. I mean, a touch-pest kid.
I always loved that. And the dog hamburger, having me, will give you that in this coffee to be able to. The summer that summers from here on will be compared to. One of the memories will be forged into the sand and then hung on a wall for years to come.
And so people get people a list of products, things like movies or music or automobiles. People tend to have a preference for the products that were popular during their youth. And so people have this natural attraction to things from their past as how this got started and then they started to look at, well, if that's true, then inducing that feeling, that connection to the past should increase favorability towards products. I want to take you back to what time a few years ago when your daughter was just starting high school.
Like many parents, you felt proud, but you also felt some distress because your baby girl was growing up. Can you tell me what happened next? My immediate response was a little bit existential dread to be honest. It's like, where did all this time go?
How do I already have a daughter that's graduated from high school? But then I subsequently went through and ran all the great memories we've had with her. And then I felt more happy. I felt more of a sense of meaning and accomplishment.
Oh, this is an important rite of passage and no things are going to be good. And so I had this experience that's very common, which is a little bit of loss, but in this sense of reflection and then more of a kind of stabilized emotionally. There hasn't limited a study of nostalgia to his own brain. He studied the minds of other people.
He once conducted an experiment where he tried to put volunteers into different kinds of moods. Some volunteers read about cute polar bears, which were supposed to elevate their mood. Others read a neutral article about the solar system. Of course, to some of us is kind of cool, but it's not the type of thing that gets most people super excited.
A third group of volunteers read about the victims of a terrible tsunami. The idea was to put them in a negative mood. This last group of volunteers reported the highest levels of nostalgia. Now, it's important to note that, I mean, this doesn't mean that negative emotions are the only thing that triggered nostalgia.
In fact, we know, as the marketing researchers have done, that you can instigate nostalgia very directly with stimuli that remind people to pass like familiar smells or sights or music. So there's this whole sensory and social type of stimuli that directly triggered nostalgia. But what we found fascinating with this emotion research is that there seems to be a class of triggers that are about negative events or life experiences or emotions that appear to motivate nostalgia for more of what we call a compensatory reason or psychological reasons that are about regulating distress. In other words, the psychological defense.
Yes, correct. Now, you and others have found that nostalgia is extremely common, very, very widespread, but I think a lot of people don't stop to think very carefully about the details of what constitutes a nostalgic memory or a nostalgic experience. And I want to try and do that in the next couple of minutes. And I want you to actually tell me about a picture that you keep on your desk that shows you standing with your wife and two kids in front of a mural in London.
Describe the photo to me and then give me a play-by-play account of what images and memories the photograph produces in your mind. Are you aware of this band, Gorillaz? So in London, at least when we lived there in the South Bank, they had this really cool art that Gorillaz, they have this graphic novel style art associated with their music. So they had these murals that were just kind of neat.
They look very animated and comic bookie. And so there's this picture of us standing there in the South Bank. Our daughter must have been around six and our son must have been around four or five. And this picture really means to me personally is here we were poor.
We didn't have any material possessions at the time because we were in grad school. So it seemed like there was nothing to lose. And so you have this picture that in many ways encapsulates that. And that's I think what's a powerful and part about nostalgia is you have these snapshots of your life that capture these very, very rich and complex memories, the stories about yourself.
And that one really to me is like here we are. We've got these small kids. We moved to England. We don't know anyone there.
And we're having this great adventure. And it's an adventure for my wife and I. But it's also an adventure for kids and for the whole family. So there are a couple of things about this memory that stand out to me.
And I think they're revealing about what your research and other research has shown about nostalgia. First of all, there is this bittersweet element to your memory of that day. I mean, you're calling the fact, for example, that you were poor, that you were dealing with small kids, that you didn't have any friends that you knew in London. So there are elements of the story that someone could hear and say this is a story of sadness and loss.
But it's also as you're telling it to me. This is also a story about a moment of family triumph, something that brought the family together. And I want you to talk about this idea that nostalgia has these two strains simultaneously. Something that feels sad, but something that feels triumphant and happy as well.
One of the things that I found very interesting about this research in nostalgia is you have these very complex emotional experiences often involving great hardship and loss and struggle. But also, as you noted, there seems to be some kind of redemptive nature to them or triumphant nature to them. In fact, some of the best nostalgic memories that we've collected were from when I was in England, we were doing this research as we had a sample of older adults. And these were older British adults who were alive and were children, most of them, during World War II when Germany was bombing Great Britain.
There are 279,000 children still in London. Many are bombed out of their homes, all look tired, but they feel safe here. A good hundred feet below ground, and their spiritual fortitude is simply grand. And a lot of these people had these nostalgic memories about serious family upheaval.
Their dad being sent away to war, them being sent to the countryside because London was being bombed. Families being separated. On the one hand, you could say these are really, really bad traumatic memories, but in nearly all of these memories that people wrote about for us, they had this experience of triumph, of gratefulness, of thankfulness for these times. Because on the one hand, they were tough, but they also stripped away all the nonsense of life and reminded them how precious it is and what's really important in terms of their family and their meaningful connections.
And so I feel like this often happens a lot in nostalgia, as you really start to get at the core of what people find personally valuable and meaningful. And a lot of times that means suffering or loss or hardship. So I think what I'm hearing you say in some ways is that non-strawdriver might involve some amount of rewriting of the past. So, you know, we're seeing ourselves in some ways as a central protagonist of this movie.
We're seeing the struggles and challenges we experience, but also the triumphs and the ways we overcame those challenges. And in some ways these are, the journalists and me would say that this might be misremembering the way things actually happen. But of course, a psychologist would say, this is exactly what all human beings need to do. We need to remember the kinds of things that we went through.
And we want to tell ourselves stories about the kind of people we are and how we became this way. And some rewriting of history, some recollection of the fact that suits our image of who we are today is what produces these nostalgic images. To me, it's almost like making a movie. You have all these memories that represent raw footage of all the filming that you've done.
And of course, anyone who's seen him, who's made a movie or watched a movie, knows you don't go watch hundreds of hours of raw footage. That would be a horrible movie. You have an editing process, a process where the director and editors and people involved with the film will sort of shape and edit the movie in a way that tells the story that they want to tell or that features the most central themes and a narrative in a meaningful way. We do that to some extent with our autobiographical memories as well.
So it's not the case that we're necessarily completely fabricating memories so much as we're selecting and weaving these different memories into a meaningful self narrative that helps us make some sense of our lives and our connection to others. It doesn't mean it can't go wrong or that people don't have false memories, but I think a decent portion of this is healthy recollection that's not necessarily false but does involve a certain level of massaging their raw footage, so to speak. When we come back, I'm going to talk to Clay about the effects of nostalgia. Is it a force for good or a force for bad?
And I'm going to ask him about one of the most nostalgic and evoking presidential campaigns in recent history. We will make America great again. Stay with us. When Johannes Hoffer came up with the word nostalgia over 300 years ago, he thought of nostalgia as a brain disease of demonic cause.
But clear at least found that nostalgia may actually be good for us. Yes, if you look within what we would refer to as normal populations, so these are research participants that don't have any particular vulnerability that might distinguish the way they recollect on the past. What you find is nostalgia seems to be generally a net positive experience that has a whole host of psychological benefits. I suppose it's possible for people to argue if you spend excessive amounts of time ruminating about the past and living in the past, this could also be bad for you.
I mean, isn't it possible that people are spending huge amounts of time in the past? In some ways, I think your research and other people's research is suggesting if distress causes people to become nostalgic, then people who are excessively nostalgic, could they not be people who are experiencing high levels of distress? Yes, I mean, in fact, we find that characteristics like loneliness, so loneliness, which we all experience from time to time, but it's also a trait. Some people tend to be more lonely than others are associated with nostalgia as is neuroticism.
These negative emotional traits tend to be associated with nostalgia, but there's also a reason to suspect that these experiences in nostalgia are helping people restore some sense of psychological well-being while people are experiencing these emotions. Besides being an expert on nostalgia, Clay, you've spent a lot of time advocating for greater ideological diversity in the social sciences. You've made the case that more conservative voices need to be part of the conversation. I'd like to try and connect these two parts of your life, the researcher who studies nostalgia on the one hand and the person who's interested in conservative thought on the other hand.
I'm going to do it by talking about the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Lots of presidential campaigns talk about the future. They talk about how changes are coming about, hope for the future, but Donald Trump very specifically turned his attention toward the past. He invoked a sense of nostalgia among followers, and he communicated the idea that America had seen brighter days, and both he and his followers felt that they wanted to make America great again.
I'm wondering whether the science of nostalgia has any insights into the appeal of Donald Trump and the success of his presidential campaign? Well, I think one thing that's important to distinguish is the difference between what we might call personal nostalgia and historical, or what some people call collective nostalgia. Now, a lot of the work that I've done, or nearly all the work I've done, and pretty much everything we've talked about thus far is about this idea of personal nostalgia, which is us revisiting memories from our own past, right, our own childhood, or youth, or whenever. These are our personal memories.
And that seems to be distinct from this more historical nostalgia, which you can imagine having nostalgic feelings for a period of time or for an idea that you never actually had any direct contact with. So there are people to step outside of politics for just a second. There are people that have nostalgia for the 1920s. They just think everything about from the architecture to the fashion that everything's great, and they never lived in that time.
And so they can't really trace it to a personal or autobiographical experience. And so I think that's important. What Trump seems to have done, either by design or by just stumbling onto it, was really latch onto this idea of historic nostalgia, that there's some kind of collective feeling of nostalgia that's beyond any individual experience that was about a time that perhaps was, at least for some, in their mind, imagine that was better. Now, of course, that doesn't mean that it was.
What matters is that he sold the idea. I have to say, when I was young in high school and college, everybody used to say, we never lost a war. We never lost a war. You remember?
I mean, there's a guy totally disruptive throwing punches. We're not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that?
When they were in a place like this, they'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks. You know, it also adds that it's not specific to Trump, so that's clearly the most recent sample from our culture, but there's actually people that have looked into Soviet era nostalgia, that there are people in Eastern Europe and Russia that have nostalgia for the Soviet Union, even if they were too young to really fully understand what was going on that time. So this idea of historical nostalgia is definitely its own kind of beast, and I don't feel like as far as the science of it, we really have a full handle on it yet. So obviously, it's much harder to study collective nostalgia and shared nostalgia than it is to study individual nostalgia.
You know, you can't bring countries into your lab and evaluate millions of people, but is it possible that at a collective level, nostalgia performs the same function that it does at an individual level? Yeah, I think that's a reasonable hypothesis. For example, people have noted that at the time of the following economic recession in the United States, you saw this. You saw this peak kind of interest in nostalgia products, whether it was reboots of movies.
On Friday, Batman returns again. The Dark Knight once again stars, which you made. Or those types of cultural consumption products. Now, these aren't experiments, of course, and they're not even really scientific in the sense that no one tried to systematically study this, but there was some acknowledgement that it seems like in times of collective people, just like times of personal people, people seem to turn more into nostalgic feelings.
So I think that's certainly a reasonable possibility. We talked earlier in our conversations about how recollections of our past might not necessarily be fabrications, but they are selective edits in some ways of our history. So you have that photograph on your desk, if you're standing with your family in front of the London mural, and you remember the good parts of that history and your story. You don't necessarily remember that maybe that morning.
Maybe you weren't the best dad that you could have been. Maybe you were impatient or you were a short-tempered. You don't remember that part of it. You remember just the fact that you were facing a challenge with your family and you were on a big adventure.
And I'm wondering is the same thing possibly true at a collective level as well, which is we have these nostalgic memories, but is it possible there's an element of them that really is insidious, especially at a cultural level? When you see the debate over Confederate memorials, for example, and the nostalgia that people feel over Confederate memorials, many people will say this is tradition and this is nostalgia. And there are equally many people on the other side who say you're remembering a history that essentially has whitewashed the issue of slavery or the issue of race relationships from that memory and replaced it with this relatively grand and benign idea of tradition. How would you respond to that?
Yeah, I think that's a fair point, even with the example of personal nostalgia. Nostalgia can be a source of inspiration and a stabilizing force as well, but you shouldn't let it blind you or it shouldn't be the only dimension through which you think about these issues because you're absolutely right. It's part of our psychological immune system to more easily forget the negative features of the past, either through the revisionist process that you mentioned or even through just natural recollection. I mean, a lot of negative memories fade from our awareness faster than positive memories, and this seems to be adaptive for us personally, moving forward in life, but also biases us towards not necessarily doing a good job of thinking about the complexities of the whole picture and thinking about other people's experiences, which may be giving the Confederate example vastly different than our own.
And so I do think that nostalgia certainly has a number of positive benefits that we shouldn't let ourselves be intoxicated by nostalgia because there are some real dangers associated with that. Clear and I wrapped up our conversation by talking about what he said was the most surprising finding about nostalgia. Nostalgia seems to actually orient the people towards the future, and so part of what seems to be going on is you experience some kind of distress, which kind of makes you shrink a little bit from pursuing goals and from the future. Like it does kick you into more of this defensive mode.
And then you bring to mind these nostalgic experiences that they don't only make you feel good. We now have evidence that they actually make you feel optimistic and hopeful about the future. And so that in turn seems to mobilize people, particularly in the social domain. And now we have a number of studies that show this both in terms of people reporting that they're more optimistic about the future, more inspired, but also behaviorally too, in terms of people actually going out wanting to interact with and meet people after they've engaged in nostalgia.
So at one level, actually, this is surprising. But as you're talking just now, I realize this also makes perfect sense. I mean, people are nostalgic in every culture. And as far as we can tell, have always, all the historical reports are just nostalgia is very widespread.
And when you see something that's as widespread as nostalgia seems to be, it's reasonable to draw the conclusion that this is performing some kind of adaptive function and not just helping people feel better, but actually being able to function better. And nostalgia has had this historically had the stigma as we talked about it. It started out very much as being considered a disease. And people even today, a lot of people say, well, I'm not nostalgic because I think about the future.
I'm not the type of person that likes to fix it or get stuck in the past. And I think what they're missing when they say that is there is a big element of nostalgia that isn't about us retreating to the past. It's about us pulling the past forward to the present and using it to mobilize us, to energize us, to take on new challenges and opportunities. Claire Rucklidge is a psychology professor at North Dakota State University.
He's the author of Nastaljia, a psychological resource. Clay, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Break. Thank you for having me. This episode was produced by Rayna Cohen, our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Maggie Pennman, Partsha, and Renee Clark.
Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. Our unsung hero this week is Tommy O'Keefe. Tommy's a programmer who works on the technical side of NPR's website, and he was on call late one night recently when we were having problems publishing our podcast. We couldn't figure out why the audio wasn't showing up in the podcast feed.
And to put it mildly, we were starting to freak out. Tommy quickly figured out what the problem was and fixed it. That would have been more than enough to win our gratitude, but we were impressed by his bedside manner. He fixed the problem while chit chatting about other stuff.
In other words, he held our hand. Thanks Tommy. We have your number on speed dial for the next crisis. For more Hidden Brain, please follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
I'm Shankar Vetantu, and this is NPR.