I recently came back from a nostalgia trip that was filled with memories, some vividly pictorial, some distinctly emotional like a very specific scent. It was a return to the city of my childhood, up to adolescence, a visit organized for the sole purpose of re-acquainting myself with the friends and family I since have known only from letters, emails, texts, and Facebook postings.

Nostalgia, now that it got me in its grip, is like a brain cloud, a floating wistfulness ripe with fruits of a sentimental journey. And the fruits keep bursting forth, connecting what I experienced on that trip with memories and feelings all subsequent to those elicited during that three-day visit.

According to neuroscientific research, nostalgia involves core brain regions implicated in self-reflection processing (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus), autobiographical memory processing (hippocampus, medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus), emotion regulation processing (anterior cingulate cortex and medial prefrontal cortex) and reward processing (striatum, substantia nigra, ventral tegmental area and ventromedial prefrontal cortex). Who knew?!

Nostalgia is said to boost self-esteem or self-awareness, increases meaning in life, fosters social connectedness and social support, encourages help-seeking, enhances psychological health and well-being  and attenuates dysphoric states such as loneliness, boredom, stress, or death anxiety. Also, nostalgia can be implemented in interventions among older adults to maintain and improve emotional and memory functions, enrich psychological well-being and ameliorate depression.

Isn’t it surprising that nostalgia is viewed as a major key to personal stability and provides us with an underlying survival function? Having essentially created an exercise, a private investigation of some bases of my own nostalgia system, I uncovered my deeper past, submitted that discovery to lived experience, and presumably stored up material that may speed me through the bumps in life that lay ahead.

When I learned about the horrors that befell my parents’ families during the holocaust, I visited the site in Paris where they had been abducted from their homes and then sent to extermination camps. But I could not taste or in any way sense their experience of that abduction but only a kind of secondary nostalgia for the Paris where they had worked, thrived, and found love and amusements that passed on to us, their survivors. That nostalgia, though not of my creating, not formed from my direct experience, none-the-less offers an emotional fortitude that, though borrowed, sustains and somehow deeply informs my sense of self.

So I wonder if nostalgia involves that mysterious Jungian concept of a collective unconscious, in which wistful resources may be transmitted through exposure to one’s history. And that learning facts and seeing photographs and mementos from past lives delivers a wistfulness and a derivative form of nostalgia. Perhaps the tragedy that befell my family helped to manufacture a longing for what was so cruelly lost. But the departure of loved ones must always evoke at least the sense of loss. We like to put those departed in the comfort and sublime bliss of an afterlife. But we remember and readily evoke nostalgia for what went before.

The wistful and the wishful merge here. And all the senses participate. And it is all too human.