What is Nostalgia? What are the Symptom of Nostalgia? Why do people have it?
Answers
Answer:
Nostalgia is often triggered by sensory stimuli, but it can be elicited by conversations, and even by self-directed memory recollection. Sometimes nostalgic triggers are unexpected surprises, and sometimes they are sought out as a means to bring comfort and happy feelings.
Answer:
Nostalgia is a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.
I don’t think that’s the case for majority of the people, and I don’t think we can consider it a symptom.
Let’s assume that the feelings of nostalgia weren’t voluntary, meaning that you weren’t talking about the past, or saw someone that reminded you of a past time in your life. If the feelings were “brought up” by our own subconscious, it seems pretty logical to me. You’re feeling depressed, so your defense mechanism might be to retrieve memories from times that were good, that made you happy.
Nostalgia doesn’t always make us happy since we might be wishing to go back to that time, maybe before we lost someone, or had an accident, did something we regret, or maybe it was a simpler time and we were happier. But the intention of bringing those memories is seems simple.
A little neurological background to the memory : It consists of 3 stages, encoding, storage and retrieval.
Encoding is like changing your money into another currency, so you can store it. There are 3 ways the information can be encoded, visualpicture), acoustic(sound) or semantic(meaning)
“Storage concerns the nature of memory stores, i.e., where the information is stored, how long the memory lasts for (duration), how much can be stored at any time (capacity) and what kind of information is held. The way we store the information affects the way we retrieve it.” Either we keep it for a limited time, like a few numbers that we repeat when we see, hear, etc, that’s the short term memory, and it lasts about 0–30 seconds. Long Term memory however, can be for a lifetime.
Retrieval is getting the information out of the storage. When we’re asked to remember something, the difference between Short Term Memory (STM) and the Long Term Memory(LTM) become very clear. For example, if I give you a list of words, then asked you to recall the 5th word, you would go through the list to retrieve it. This is your STM just repeating the input. But if I ask you to tell me what did you wear to your first date ever, you’re going to associate different information to retrieve the one you want. Perhaps you put on perfume in front of the mirror, or your date told you they liked the color.
LTM can be activated without any conscious input. You could be doing daily chores, and a word pops into your head. This is my personal opinion, but I think this is what happens when a person or a place feels familiar, but I’ve never met them, or never been there. I think my brain is trying to retrieve an information and it’s not there, but it should have been.
The symptoms of depression are quite a lot, and it’s a combination of those that help us understand if the patient is depressed. But I find it reasonable that the brain would turn to comfortable times as a defense mechanism.
So nostalgic. Suddenly, I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young freshman again, both elated and terrified to have gained entry into a top-tier university and a well-known piano performance program (with imposing recital halls).