Summer has not yet passed, but as soon as it does, many will remember the good times at the beach bar and, of course, they will long for the romantic moments they lived with that summer love that we like so much. They will all be homesick, but how do their brains do it?
A curious study recently published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (2015) by Japanese researchers seems to have delved into the brain keys to nostalgic feeling, using functional magnetic resonance imaging.
In their experiment, healthy women who underwent the neuroimaging test while viewing photos of their childhoods collaborated, and thus they tried to analyze the neural correlates of this type of emotion. As has already been described in other investigations, activity was found in two systems of the brain: the memory system and the reward system.
Specifically, Kentaro Oba and his collaborators observed that, in the face of photos of pleasant moments in childhood, the brains of these women significantly activated structures such as the hippocampus (fundamental in memory), the substantia nigra and the ventral striatum (important in processing of rewards). In addition, the coactivation of the hippocampus and the ventral striatum was stronger the more the person was prone to nostalgia.
It is interesting to be able to explain human feelings, which in the end are nowhere else other than in our body. Not only does this not take away their beauty, but it also allows us to appreciate how wonderful the human brain is.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
