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Hmmm, is wandering the backstreets of memory a healthy practice?

We all reminisce from time to time. It is part of being human or more accurately of the human condition. Looking back to make sense of where we have arrived in our life. How the past shaped and influenced who we became and how it may influence what tomorrow may bring.

What does science tell us about this mental exercise? The experts say that reminiscing about the past acts as an emotional safety net helping our brains process stress and build identity. Several principles come into play:

Our brains used a process called fading affect bias to lessen the sting of negative memories over time while keeping positive ones vivid. Okay, guilty as charged.

Autobiographical memories are anchored to our formative years (ages 10 to 30) creating a reminiscence bump that supplies building blocks for our sense of identity. Hmmm, perhaps yes, but the particular arc our life takes may change what the most formative years are.

We sometimes exhibit rosy retrospection bias which means editing out stress or boredom from historical events. This can make our past feel simpler and more special than it actually was at the time. Yes, guilty as charged.

Sensory triggers – familiar sights, old songs, distinctive smells – activate the hippocampus and amygdala areas of our brain releasing the chemical dopamine. This can convert a random sensory cue into a comforting memory. Yes, no argument here.

Now my take on the exercise. Nostalgia is part and parcel of reminiscing – a desire to return to a time in our life when things were, at least in the filter of memory, simpler or better. It is a way to escape from the pressures of finding our way in the modern world and the bear traps scattered throughout it.

We reach back to recall the periods of joy that may have lasted a long time – months or years – or only a brief time – days or weeks. We call up these periods like precious gemstones and polish them so they seem even brighter.

For me personally, I reach back most often for the simpler times when life had fewer moving parts. Before computers, cell phones, the internet and AI – the pre-digital era.

Yes, things took longer to undertake. We did things manually with the margin of error that comes with it. But I was able to keep pace with life back then. Now it races on ahead of me. I try to say: Go ahead. Leave me behind. I am okay with that. But it drags me along in its relentless wake.

Life in the rearview mirror may indeed be selectively edited by rosy retrospection. As we age and our memory begins to lose traction, the good memories are the ones that tend to endure and that is a good thing.

I have more years behind me than ahead of me. So I permit myself to wander now and then through the corridors and backstreets of memory. I know I cannot stay there. But it comforts me to linger a bit and shelter from the hurly-burly of modern life if only for a few hours. It keeps me grounded when life feels out of my control.

~  Now Available Online from Amazon, Chapters Indigo or Barnes & Noble: Hunting Muskie, Rites of Passage – Stories by Michael Robert Dyet

~ Michael Robert Dyet is also the author of Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel (now out of print) which was a double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com .

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Tags:   metaphor · Michael Robert Dyet · nostalgia · reminiscence · reminiscing · rosy retrospection biasNo Comments