The feeling of nostalgia is a feeling that we all enjoy because it takes us to good memories of the past, such as childhood memories. However, it seems that nostalgia has other important benefits besides making us relive good memories.
According to a new study, the feeling of nostalgia also has effects on our perception of pain. The researchers behind the study suggest that nostalgia could be used as a non-drug therapy to relieve low-level pain such as headaches and mild clinical pain.
Memories can literally ‘bind our wounds’
Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences used fMRI to determine whether nostalgia has an effect on pain. asked adult participants, whose activities they measured, the nostalgic levels of the images shown and the ratings of pain from thermal stimuli. Among the nostalgic news shown, scenes and items from an average childhood, such as a formerly popular candy bar, cartoons and games played in the schoolyard, were shown, while in the control group, relevant scenes and items from modern daily life were shown to the participants.
At the end of this experiment, it was observed that when people saw nostalgic images, they experienced a lower pain level in pain assessment compared to the images in the control group, and the greatest effect was experienced in low-intensity pain.
In addition, participants who watched nostalgic images had decreased activity in the left lingual gyrus and parahippocampal gyrus, two brain regions that play a role in pain perception. Accordingly, the activity occurring in the thalamus, which is the brain region responsible for transferring information between the body and the cortex, is related to both nostalgia and pain degrees; It was discovered that the thalamus can integrate nostalgia information and transmit it to the pain pathways.
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