Musical Nostalgia

Musical nostalgia is more than just a cultural phenomenon. Researchers (doing research on how human brains work) see musical nostalgia more like a neuronic command. Evidence suggests that our brains bind us to the music we heard as teenagers more tightly than anything we’ll hear as adults and this a connection that doesn't weaken as we age. Songs from our teens and early 20s trigger personal memories and in our brains, triggers our prefrontal cortexes where info relevant to personal life and relationships reside. Our favorite songs stimulate our brain’s pleasure circuit, which releases an influx of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and other neurochemicals that make us feel good. This is interesting to me and my own sense of musical nostalgia validates the research in my mind. But what is even more interesting is the idea that musical nostalgia, like so many other things, can be inherited. It evokes a different memory but a connection to the music my parents played and I grew up with also exists. This may also be why I like to move around between the stations that play music from different decades on satellite radio. Either way, once a song makes it to the top of the charts, the memories people associate with it stay in our cultural consciousness (and my consciousness-thinking about the next time I hear Louie Louie) and if you’re a teen or young adult it may become the basis of your own musical nostalgia in the future.