Episode 2: "What happens in your brain when you feel nostalgic"

Nostalgia is triggered by familiar reminders of the past and stimulates brain activity. It involves self-reflection, reliving memories, and emotion regulation. Nostalgia is a bittersweet feeling that can soothe negative emotions. It also activates the brain's reward center, leading to pleasant and comforting emotions. Watching a Disney movie can help you experience nostalgia. What happens in your body when you're nostalgic? Nostalgia is an emotion that is triggered by familiar smells, sounds, visuals, or other reminders of someone's past. Experiencing nostalgia stimulates activities such as metabolic activity and blood flow in the frontal limbic, paralimbic, and midbrain areas of the brain. First component is self-reflection. For self-relevant actions, the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex are activated in the brain. Self-reflection is part of nostalgia since we created ourselves by reliving our past memories in the present and reflecting on them over and over again, which requires stimuli of personal thoughts, goals, and traits. This makes it very self-descriptive. Next component is the autobiographical memory. Here, the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex, in addition to the hippocampus, are activated. This provides the content for our memories, which creates nostalgia since we use our memory to review our old experiences from our minds. Those stimuli are mostly positive experiences. Thus, they can be negative as well. Next component is emotion regulation. What makes nostalgia differentiate from common autobiographical memory is its generally positive content and its distinctive emotional character. Nostalgia is seen as an ambivalent emotion, meaning that it has a strong fluctuation between positive and negative senses, which is why nostalgia is often described as a bittersweet feeling. This fluctuation enables this emotion to regulate negative feelings and soothe emotional conflict. Last component is the rewarding. When experiencing nostalgia, the hippocampus, substantia nigra, the ventral tegmental, and the ventral stratum are activated, which are part of the reward center of the brain. This is the reason why nostalgia is often connected to a feeling of pleasant and comforting emotions, making it a satisfying experience. So now that you know what happens in your body when you're feeling nostalgia, maybe turn on a Disney movie and try to experience it yourself.