Olivia Ovenden’s examination of nostalgia for Esquire—if you can get around all the talk about Friends—had me mulling my thoughts about aphantasia, SDAM, and my emotionless memory.
Nostalgic memories are intimately bound up with emotions, and by accessing the former, we trigger the latter. That’s why studies have shown our fondness for the music we listened to as teenagers – and gradual, Grandpa Simpson-like rejection of new pop as we age – is as much a function of our neurology as our capacities as music critics. When we’re younger, we feel emotions more strongly, especially those linked to cues from music (only love and drugs top it for inducing a cascade of the pleasure chemicals dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin). Young brains are more plastic, and that cocktail of neurotransmitters, coupled with music’s increased importance as a social bond when we’re young, embeds it with strong emotional memories; the song that played when you had your first kiss, say, is imprinted in your brain like a handprint in wet concrete. When you hear it again 30 years later, that memory is activated. Nostalgia rushes through you. Similarly, smell and taste – think of Proust’s madeleines – can have the same effect.
While I’ve got a Nostalgia category here on the blog, my actual mental experience of it doesn’t function like the above at all, presumably because of my inability to mentally time travel; I can conceptualize my memories but not visualize or revisit them. It’s true that I’ve populated my Apple Music library with as much music from different periods of my life that I could think of, but none of it specifically conjures up feelings of one sort or another.
The familiarity I experience from old music, old movies, old television shows, or old photos and blog posts, again, is more conceptual than actual.
The only time, for example, I ever remember past events causing me an emotional response was when I showed my college girlfriend a videotape which happened to include footage of both my dead family cat and my dead maternal grandfather, neither of whom did I actually, grieve over in any typical fashion at the time of their respective deaths; I did, however, openly weep at the videotape.
My brain required an outside prompting—an external visualization—to experience what other people apparently naturally experience from memory alone.