Feeling Nostalgia May Relieve Pain; A recent study revealed an unexpected link between the feeling of nostalgia and pain. Accordingly, it was discovered that nostalgia ‘alleviates’ the feeling of pain. The feeling of nostalgia is a feeling that we all enjoy because it takes us to good memories of the past, such as our childhood memories. However, it seems that nostalgia has other important benefits besides making us relive good memories.
According to a new study, the feeling of nostalgia also has effects on our perception of pain. The researchers behind the study suggest that nostalgia could be used as a non-drug therapy to relieve low-level pain such as headaches and mild clinical pain.
You may be interested: How About Playing Amiga 500 Games Today?
Memories can literally ‘bind our wounds’
To determine whether nostalgia has an effect on pain, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences asked adult participants to rate the nostalgic levels of the displayed images and the pain from thermal stimuli, as they measured their brain activity with fMRI. Among the nostalgic news shown, scenes and items from an average childhood such as a formerly popular candy bar, cartoons and games played in the schoolyard were shown, while in the control group, relevant scenes and items from modern daily life were shown to the participants.
At the end of this experiment, it was observed that when people saw nostalgic images, they experienced a lower level of pain in pain assessment compared to the images in the control group, and the greatest effect was experienced in low-intensity pain.
You may be interested: Do You Need A Car In Cappadocia?
In addition, it was determined that the activity of the participants watching the nostalgic images decreased in the left lingual gyrus and parahippocampal gyrus, two brain regions that play a role in the perception of pain. Accordingly, the activity occurring in the thalamus, which is the brain region responsible for transferring information between the body and the cortex, is related to both nostalgia and pain degrees; It was discovered that the thalamus could integrate nostalgia information and transmit it to the pain pathways.
You may be interested: Instagram Font Generator
