Nostalgia has been defined as a sentimental longing or affection for one's past, and has been known to reduce individual's perception of pain. But how does this happen? Does nostalgia impact how the brain or the bodily site of pain??
Well, a very recent study (published a few days ago on March 1st 2022) by Zhang et al. (2022) discovered the underlying neural networks responsible for the analgesic effect of nostalgia. Authors ran a study involving two groups: one would was exposed to triggers for childhood memories, and the other was exposed to control cues. Both groups were simultaneously exposed to pain in the form of heat at varying degrees (yikes!), and all the while this was occurring in an 'fMRI' machine (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to measure brain activity.
It was found that the nostalgia group perceived pain to be lower, especially for milder forms of pain. It was also found that this occurred through two key areas of the brain: while the anterior thalamus encoded the nostalgia, the posterior parietal thalamus encoded pain perception. It was found that the 'analgesic' effect was occurring due to the nostalgia brain area modulating the activity going on in the pain area of the brain.
"How can this be?", you might ask, "isn't pain from the outside in?" Well, it's not quite that simple. Noxious stimuli such as pain is received from the nerves on our body, but are coded and understood as 'pain' inside the brain. This is a typical ascending pathway of pain (from the outside, up to the brain). But as the saying goes, what goes up must come down: there are also descending pathways that come into play with pain (from up top in the brain, down to the body), and this is the theory that this pain research is based on. What we do with our mind can actually impact how we perceive pain in the body.
So, what does this mean for you? This article suggest that for milder pain that does not require medication, the power is put back into your hands, and the power of nostalgic could be alternative way to help regulate pain.
- Chelsea
References:
Zhang, M., Yang, Z., Zhong, J.,, Zhang, Y., Lin, X., Cai, H. Kong, Y. (2022), Thalamocortical mechanisms for nostalgia-induced analgesia. Journal of Neuroscience. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2123-21.2022
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