![]() ![]() Hamilton said he thinks one of the things that continues to draw viewers to “Friends” is that it’s not terribly deep and follows the classic sitcom formula. “That documentary really scratched the nostalgia itch edge for a lot of people.”įor younger people, sitcoms including “The Office,” “Friends,” and “How I Met Your Mother” are drawing eyeballs. “Even though it feels very familiar to a lot of us, and a lot of us can remember it really well, it also feels very, very different than the time we’re currently living in,” he said. The first example that came to mind was ESPN’s “Last Dance,” documentary mini-series that delves into Michael Jordan’s basketball career and his last season with the Chicago Bulls, dating from 1997 to 1998. Hamilton, who is Slate Magazine’s pop culture critic, said you can see evidence of “COVID nostalgia” in lots of areas of pop culture. “So, I think it’s a pretty natural response that in some instances people would look back to simpler times, whether its 20 years ago or even like six months ago.” “For most of us, this is a pretty unprecedented thing to be living through,” he said. There’s nothing that is going to come up that’s going to be uncertain if we revisit something that we’ve already experienced.” Pop Culture, COVID-19 and NostalgiaĪmerican and media studies associate professor Jack Hamilton echoed Long’s assertion that nostalgia is a common response to feelings of anxiety and uncertainty. “With all of the uncertainty in the world right now, it makes sense that we would want to retreat into something that we’re familiar with, because we can predict it. “We like to be able to predict what’s going to happen,” Long said. She says humans are “prediction machines.” The assistant professor brought up another interesting point. “It’s making them feel better, because they’re entering a positive emotional state by virtue of this kind of linked memory that they have between their lives in general and what they were doing when they were first experiencing, for example, television shows.” “So, what potentially is happening is people are kind of being transported back to an earlier time in their lives where most of the memories that they have from that time point probably skew positively,” she said. Long says there is also evidence that people tend to have a better memory for positive experiences. “If you were to go back to high school, you’d be transported back to other experiences you had while you were there,” she said, much like my friend’s grandmother’s strawberry shortcake evokes memories of church socials. She says many of peoples’ experiences and memories are linked to each other. Long fully appreciates why people are reaching back in time, to the days before wearing face masks and distancing 6 feet were the norm. Nicole Long heads UVA’s Long-Term Memory Lab. “Then we do variants on that task while we record electroencephalography,” a mechanism that monitors electrical activity in the brain in real time. “We use behavioral experiments where we have someone come into the lab and try to learn a list of items, words, pictures – that sort of thing,” she said. “The broad or long-term goals of my research are for us to understand how these fundamental processes work and then enable the development of training protocols to help people’s memory to better understand memory deficits and aging … the very clearest example being Alzheimer’s. “Research in my lab, as broadly construed, is interested in memory processing, in particular, strategic memory processes,” she said. Nicole Long is an assistant professor of psychology and leads the University of Virginia’s Long-Term Memory Lab. Psychologists say memories are deeply embedded and recalling them can bring people peace of mind. ![]() Perhaps you’ve picked up a favorite old novel, or streamed reruns of “Cheers,” “Little House on the Prairie” or even “Family Affair.” Or, like a high school friend of mine, made her grandmother’s beloved strawberry shortcake recipe that transported her back in time to the summertime church socials of her childhood.Ī wave of nostalgia is coursing across the country, and it’s no coincidence. Reading those lyrics now, it’s easy to understand the appeal of the times that came before the world was overtaken by the novel coronavirus, which has now infected more than 17 million people worldwide and killed more than 150,000 Americans. Smiles we gave to one another for the way we were. ![]() Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind Misty water-colored memories of the way we were Originally a song about college love, today its opening lyrics can read like a reflection of the effect of COVID-19. But musically, it marked the first time Streisand notched a No. Long ago, in 1973, there was a movie called “The Way We Were,” starring Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford. ![]()
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