“Our ancestors wouldn’t have made it out of the Savannah if they’d had to parse through billions of search results on ‘how to survive a lion encounter’ in tenths of a second.” The downside when it comes to L&D is, people who undergo traditional learning only remember about 5% of what they are taught. Our ancestors wouldn’t have made it out of the Savannah if they’d had to parse through billions of search results on ‘how to survive a lion encounter’ in tenths of a second, while a lion stared them down. Forget cognitive overload: a brain with perfect memory would have been terrible for the survival of our species. When you tried to remember that one thing that happened on your sixth birthday, your brain would be slammed with about 7,010,000,000 results in 0.52 seconds. Psychologist Daniel Schacter has a useful analogy: imagine if our brains worked like a Google search engine. Simply put, if our brains remembered everything perfectly, we’d be paralysed by information.
Why are our memories so poor? Because, it turns out, our brains are wired to forget. One third of those had two or more mistaken eyewitnesses. But poor memory can be damaging: 73% of the wrongful convictions overturned by DNA evidence were based on eyewitness testimony. For those of us who’ve misplaced our keys, neglected to pick up milk at the grocery store, or forgotten a birthday, a poor memory can be relatively harmless. Let’s therefore start with the obvious: our memories are notoriously unreliable. Some people think back longingly to things like their school years, but they wouldn’t necessarily want to relive them. In fact, it’s quite likely we’re misremembering or selectively remembering the good old days. It doesn’t matter whether the time we long for was actually a happier time or not. Nostalgia is the positive, rose-tinted spin we put on our memories.
Here at The Smarty Train, we think about memory all the time. The rise of nostalgia has had me thinking about memory. It offers comfort in the face of loss, anxiety, isolation, or uncertainty. Nostalgia is trending because we reach for nostalgia in times of crisis. It also helps us feel more socially connected, loved, and protected. Nostalgia buffers us against boredom, helps us combat loneliness, jumpstarts our desire to go after key life goals, and gives us the confidence to act on that desire.
#My deep heritage nostalgia tv#
More than half of us have turned to familiar, nostalgic TV shows for comfort during the last year. ’90s and ’00s newsletters have been launched to take us back to the days of Tamagotchi’s, Ouija Boards, and Pop Tarts. Those of us who are missing the sounds of our colleagues (including the office dog) have been offered this gem, so we can immerse ourselves in the soothing ambience of a buzzing office.
Queen, Elton John and Bryan Adams are also suddenly trending, in case you’re looking for a playlist. Toto’s Africa had a renaissance, as did Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles (played up to 63,000 times a day in May). In spring of 2020, Spotify saw a spike in the popularity of old songs. It points to a deeper shared need: Nostalgia has been trending since lockdowns kicked in during the first part of last year. This turn to animating photos of our ancestors isn’t a coincidence. It has, expectedly, become rich fodder for memes, with people animating photos of great-grandparents and famous composers, but also the infamous Ronaldo statue. Launched by DNA-based ancestry-tracking service My Heritage, Deep Nostalgia uses AI to animate faces in family photos. You may have seen Deep Nostalgia making waves on social media last week.
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