The power of nostalgia and a first kiss

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:00Kennedy and Khrushchev. All episodes available now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:10Hello and welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Hannah Gelbart and I'm the host of What in the World, your daily podcast for the stories that get people talking. You can listen by searching for BBC What in the World wherever you found this podcast. Today we're talking about the past. Memory is a pretty powerful thing and we tend to look back on our firsts with fondness. Our first phone, our first best friend, our first kiss. More on my first kiss later. But it turns out you can also feel nostalgic for things that you weren't around for. So what is nostalgia? Nostalgia. That sentimental feeling of the past.

1:51I get it from looking through old photos or getting out my old iPod or CD player, or even just sitting down and watching the same rerun of a TV show that I used to love. But here's something interesting. Gen Z seems to be especially nostalgic for things that they never experienced. There's been an explosion of interest in Y2K fashion, that look from the early noughties, a love for old tech like digital cameras and flip phones, and the constant romanticisation of old TV shows. Yet you know what I'm talking about, Friends, the Gilmore Girls, Sex and the City, the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Some people are even saying that they feel they were born in the wrong generation.

2:28They wish they had school memories from the 90s and noughties. So how can you experience nostalgia for something you didn't know? And is it all part of a bigger marketing plan? So nostalgia really is just part of being human and it shows up differently in different cultures around the world. And in Portuguese, there's a special word for it, saudade. This is actually my brother's favourite word because he lives in Brazil, so I asked him to tell us what it means. What I really love about it is you can't translate it into English in one direct word, so it paints a really beautiful picture for me.

3:03Words that we do like to translate it to are a certain melancholy, a yearning, a longing. So people generally say it to each other when they miss each other or if they miss certain things. It's really cool because it's everywhere in Brazilian and Portuguese culture, in literature, in poetry and especially in music. So in Portuguese fado and Brazilian bossa nova. Thanks, Ben. Tenho saudades tuas. Miss you. So let's get into the science now. And to help explain nostalgia and the brain, I'm speaking to Ryan Lazardi, who's a professor of media studies at State University of New York. You've studied nostalgia.

3:42You've written books about it. Hi, Ryan. Hello, how are you? Very well, how are you? Pretty good. You know, I'm feeling a bit nostalgic. So let's get into that. We know people love the things that make them feel nostalgic. It's that bittersweet feeling. It's quite a complex emotion, actually. Is there a scientific explanation for why we're drawn to nostalgia? Yes, absolutely. So nostalgia tends to, at least the research says, that nostalgia tends to work on us in four different ways. One being self-reflection. So we take, and this is actually, I think, one of the most important and sort of positive elements of nostalgia, is we can take something that happened in the past and we can potentially learn from it.

4:24It doesn't mean that we will always learn from it or that we will always look at it in a way that is sort of adaptive and healthy. But we reflect on the past. And then the second being autobiographic memory, meaning a continuity of self. We're putting together – as humans, we tend to want to organize our lives and we make categories and lists. And this helps us put together the pieces of our past in sort of an autobiographic way. And then obviously the last two being very connected, emotional regulation. So I'm not feeling so good right now or the world is crazy right now. Let's try to look backwards.

5:05And so I'm not feeling quite, you know, as I want to. So let me help regulate those emotions by feeling nostalgic. And then obviously that's connected directly to the reward center, the dopamine releases and that part of it, the whole actual science of it. Dopamine, that's that hormone that makes you feel good. Yeah. And what I think is fascinating about the research is the way it talks about the object in motion tends to stay in motion. So the memories that we tend to look back on nostalgically, our brain flags them and says, okay, well, that made you happy last time. Let's just bring that back up again when you're maybe not feeling quite as happy.

5:45Obviously, the way we remember the past changes. We don't always remember it accurately. And so the brain will take those nostalgic memories and say, well, let's just sand off the rough edges a little bit and give you the version of the past that will help you feel better right now. So a little bit of rose tinting. And what is it that causes nostalgia? Do you need to experience something a few times to get it? Why is it that some things give us nostalgia and others don't? I think repetition is really important. Once we think of something and it helped us feel positive, we'll tend to think of it again in a positive way.

6:25The more our brain puts a shiny gloss over an object, the more we'll notice it because it's a shiny object. And so the more it happens, the more it's going to tend to happen. There is definitely that shiny gloss, that positive feeling. But some people also get sad over nostalgia too. It can tap into that feeling of missing someone or something, of things being better in the past than they are now. Where does that sadness come from? Yeah, I think a lot of the sadness for me, and I will also mention that I am so susceptible to nostalgia. Most of my research is about media companies saying, hey, you should look at this.

7:03And I am the first person to say, OK, sure, no problem, I will. And but I think that sadness comes from the the understanding that we will not be able to recapture it, that there is no way to bring back the past. That's where the sadness of nostalgia starts creeping in. Talk me through what you found in your research of how media companies are using nostalgia now and the resurgency we're seeing, you know, 90s, noughties culture. Why are media companies using this and how are they using it? Yeah, the cynical answer is that because that's the properties that they own. So they would want to say to themselves, well, I don't want to just let that dusty catalog just sit there and not make more money.

7:49And so I'll capitalize on that. And it doesn't really matter whether you remembered it or you're fond of this particular movie. We're going to remake it because we own it. That's the cynical version. The more generous version is that they are working toward trying to create eternal classics because then generations will keep turning – multiple generations will turn to that property and keep investing their time and money in it. I think that hoping to create new audiences of new generations is very much at the forefront of the impetus for the media companies bringing out their back catalogs. That makes sense from a financial perspective.

8:33And by properties, I'm understanding TV shows, movies, all of these kind of things. But it's not just the things that they own, is it? Because it's also how things like flip phones and digital cameras and Y2K fashion, which aren't necessarily the properties, to use that word, of these media companies, but they also tap into this past that we may yearn for, that we may remember a little bit more fondly before that perception that there is so much doom and gloom in the world right now. Yeah, I think that perception is key, right? I mean, listen, I'm not saying that things are going well. The connection between wanting to go back to a time when things were maybe even just simpler, you know, even if it's just that everything is so complicated and we see everything in an instant these days that turning towards something that is maybe a little more low tech or a little bit more simple may be, you know, a very important way to sort of regulate.

9:30or just give ourselves a break from the modern craziness. So Ryan, you know how we've been saying that Gen Z are feeling nostalgia for things from before they were born? Well, we have been hearing from someone who can relate to this. This is Marie Tussiama, who founded the Instagram page Archive Ivoire, and it shares the Ivory Coast aesthetics and pop culture from the 90s and early 2000s, and it's hugely popular. I think that I share nostalgic fashion because I wanted Cote d 'Ivoire to be also at the center of this Y2K revival discourses because as I was searching I kept thinking that okay we are talking about European Y2K revival, American Y2K revival but we are not mostly talking about francophone Africa and I wanted to show the diversity of the way we dress in Cote d 'Ivoire.

10:29And I'm also very happy that young people are into this. We are really, really, really nostalgic of a time where we couldn't have access of things, basically. I think since I wasn't able to dress as a woman, where in those clips, in those TV shows, I'm really nostalgic of this time. And I kind of really want to recreate to satisfy my younger self, basically. So Ryan, how does this kind of nostalgia that Marie described work for things that people haven't experienced themselves? When you have less sort of shared cultural touch points across a generation, you're going to have that generation try to reach backwards to a time in which there was that sort of universal, more universal experience.

11:27And I think that that might be their way to socially connect with one another. So they may all have different TikTok streaming feeds, but they all can look back at something from the 80s or the 90s that their parents are telling them. So it's sort of hitting them from all sides. Their parents are telling them, hey, this is really cool and I really liked it, you should watch it. The media companies are saying, hey, this is really cool. You should keep liking it just like your parents did. And then they're also maybe their friends, they may be able to sort of turn to them and say, well, this is at least something we can share, even though we didn't experience it, you know, in real time, we can share this media experience together.

12:08Apart from us being the targets of marketing, and consumerism and media companies tapping into our nostalgia to try to sell us things and make us watch things. Can nostalgia ever be bad for us? If we allow it to the media version of nostalgia, where it's just whatever constellation of texts and remakes and video games that you loved as a young person. But if we allow that to become the version of ourselves that we are always looking back on, and we're not creating that sort of conscious self-identity continuity, then yeah, I do think it could be a problem. I would be really interested to see what nostalgia will look like 20 years from now, 30 years from now.

12:50What will it look like when the younger generation today, you know, the youngest generation grows up and is starting to look back on right now? Like, what is the now-stalgia of this era? The now-stalgia. So what will the shiny, glossy best bits of now look like in the future, I wonder? Ryan, thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely. Thank you. You can find more episodes like this by searching for BBC What in the World. And after the break, you're going to hear about that very personal memory of my first kiss as we look at the ancient origins of kissing. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service.

13:32Is the US conceding the green energy race to China? When the Trump administration said it was pulling out of the Paris Agreement for a second time, it seemed like a wholesale withdrawal from the climate change question. All the while, China's becoming a global powerhouse of green technology. What could happen in the long run if the US continues to cede the floor to China on clean energy? Listen to the global story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I am Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union in 1962. And I'm Max Kennedy, the nephew of U.S.

14:12President John F. Kennedy. We explore what was a terrifying moment in history. The story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. How close the world came to nuclear war. And what they had to do to pull it back from the brink. The bomb, Kennedy and Khrushchev. All episodes available now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London, and this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet.

14:58Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

15:06Welcome back. I'm Hannah Gelbart and this is the documentary from the BBC World Service. Today I'm sharing two stories from our podcast, What in the World? We've been hearing about memory and nostalgia. Things like touch, smell and intimacy can trigger the strongest of memories and that brings us to kissing. So take a moment and think back to your first kiss. Mine was...

15:59awkward, fleeting rite of passage. Then they're ejected by management to make space for paying customers. Now imagine if that moment had happened 21 million years ago. No basement, no school uniform, just a mouth collision between two big hairy apes. Now I know why I wanted to kiss that guy. He was kind of cute. But we don't really know what was going on between the prehistoric apes because there aren't any obvious survival or reproductive benefits to kissing. But scientists at Oxford University in the UK now think they've tracked down the beginning of mouth-on-mouth kissing. So forget every romantic Hollywood idea you've ever had about kissing, we're heading back to the start of this unexplained behaviour.

16:47Let's find out more about this now from our science correspondent Victoria Gill who is here in the studio with me and I'm going to start by blowing you a kiss. Oh, that's so nice, Hannah. Come on, back at you. So when was the first kiss? How have researchers been trying to answer that question? So they've answered this in kind of an evolutionary way, which is why they were looking at lots of different species kissing. To begin with, they had to look across the animal kingdom at sort of where kissing happens and then work out the kind of evolutionary relationships between those animals to sort of track it back through time and evolution to work out how old kissing is in our kind of biological history.

17:28So that's where looking at and gathering evidence of lots of different species kissing comes into this. And to do that, they had to define the kiss so that they knew that they were comparing the same behaviour. So they defined it in this really unromantic way where they, I think they describe it as oral to oral contact with some movement of lips or mouth parts and no food transfer. So that's what we have, the kind of biological definition of a kiss. And essentially, they looked at species that there's documented evidence of them kissing. They also looked at YouTube videos of animals kissing to sort of find out which species exactly indulge in this mouth to mouth contact.

18:06And they worked out the evolutionary relationships between them. And they worked out in particular that lots and lots of primates kiss, lots of monkeys kiss, lots of great apes kiss. And so essentially, if the great apes kiss and we kiss as a human's kiss, then the last shared ancestor between those great apes and us humans would probably also have kissed. And the last shared ancestor was around 21 million years ago. So that's how we get to this date of the first kiss emerging in our behaviour 21 and a half million years ago. It is quite romantic, I have to say. So you said it's not just monkeys, it's not just ape-like animals.

18:42What about the other species that kiss? Well, it's funny because there are behaviours that look like kissing, which is why they had to kind of define it in this way. So it has to be this positive interaction. It has to be this mouth to mouth contact. It's not like birds feeding worms to their young or anything. Exactly. Yeah, that's why they talk about no food transfer. Because if you look at things like parent animals chewing up, like pre-chewing food and then feeding it to their young, that looks like a lot like kissing. There's a lot of mouth to mouth contact there. So when they look across the animal kingdom, when they looked at both the scientific literature, and they see it on YouTube when people film animals in prairie dogs, in some birds, in wolves.

19:23They've even seen it in some zoo polar bears. And that was really quite sloppy, involving a lot of tongue. Oh, no. But I'm told by polar bear experts that that's pretty unusual. But yeah, lots of species seem to kiss each other. So tell me more about the research. So this was led by a researcher called Matilda Brindle at the University of Oxford. And her and her colleagues essentially just trawled through the literature to try and figure out this puzzle. What they really want to know is why we kiss. And it's really significant in terms of why this is so puzzling. So there isn't an obvious advantage to kissing.

19:59There isn't a reproductive advantage. It's not going to make you have more offspring that share your genes. There's not a survival advantage. In fact, there's some risks, right? If you're kind of mouth to mouth with another individual, there's a lot of microbe transfer. Like glandular fever, the kissing, so-called kissing disease. Exactly. So that's why they asked that question, because there are some risks involved. And answering this question, they've not quite got to the nub of why we kiss and why kissing evolved. But they have answered the question of when it emerged, that it's this ancient kind of evolutionary route that connects us with other particularly primate species and great apes.

20:41So that kind of suggests that there's something significant about kissing. It's important, you know, and we know it's important to us culturally and socially. Right. If you think of all of the cultures, like not all human cultures kiss. if you think of you know the classic kind of cinematic ending to a romantic film it's the kiss right it's so socially important to us so what they're trying to get to the nub of and what they're trying to open up with this study is answering the question of the biology of why right like why this has become such a significant part of our behavior of our social interactions but of other animals too.

21:17Could it be because it feels so good doesn't it to be in that close proximity with someone but also I always thought it was a lot of it was about smell because when you're up close kissing someone you can you can smell their breath but you can also smell the scent of their body and whether you're attracted to that or not is that one of the reasons we kiss well there's there's a lot of theories out there about it that that kind of are looking at exactly that so whether that's something that we can take clues about sort of how kissing feels and the cues that get exchanged and how we can kind of sus and smell each other and kind of be close to each other, whether that's something that's such an important part of partnering up and of bonding.

21:57Because what we do know is like social bonds between primates, including humans. You know, we're another primate, we're another animal. And our social bonds are so important, you know, for our survival. And they're important in the animal kingdom as well. If you look at social groups of great apes, of chimpanzees and gorillas, for example, those close-knit social bonds they're very protective they help individuals raise their young to survive to get food to you know to help each other through life so it's it's clearly very significant the other the other theory or one of the other theories is that it emerged from our sort of ape roots from our ape ancestors that it was a grooming and bonding thing that turned into and evolved into kissing but there's lots of theories out there what we do know is that it's an incredibly important part of our sort of social and cultural repertoire it totally is and talking about romance can animals be in love as well can kissing be romantic between animals or are we just projecting human ideas onto them which is why you know it's so cute to see gorillas kissing maybe cuter to see gorillas kissing than a couple kissing on the underground you know that's such an interesting question so i think we we can't get away from it i think hannah it's one of the reasons we're talking about this story right because it's something that we feel such an a close association with and we're so interested in the idea that this very kind of human romantic behavior is something that's sort of shared across the animal kingdom it's sort of lovely it's adorable and whether animals fall in love it's that again is like an even bigger question that applies like individually to like lots and lots of different species and it depends what we mean by that question right it comes back to that definition of like what is a kiss when you're looking at the biology of like mouth-on-mouth kissing you have to define it in this really scientific unromantic way so do you mean can animals bond forever or does it mean something very human about that kind of falling in love that being absolutely overwhelmed and obsessed by one or the other individual i don't think we can really answer that question but we can look at the the bonds and the behavior between these animals by watching how they connect with each other and watching their societies to see what those bonds and what love and what kissing actually means to them and kissing it doesn't always have to be romantic it can be platonic like kissing a friend on the cheek or you know some families the parents kiss their kids on the lips and that must happen in the animal world too Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

24:34And that's and that's something that this this whole scope of looking at actually, when that arose, that included all of those just, you know, affiliative affectionate parent to infant friend to friends platonic kissing, you know, kissing between just individuals who were not partnered up in in that in a reproductive sense. so yeah it's absolutely this is trying to get to the root of something that isn't just romantic that is you know every kind of definition of the kiss the mouth-on-mouth kiss I have got this lovely warm fuzzy feeling so thank you so much you're very welcome my pleasure well that does make my teenage basement moment feel slightly less embarrassing and if you've ever been worried about your kissing technique, just remember, you're fine.

25:22We've had 21 million years of evolution to work on it.

25:30That's it from us for this special episode of the documentary from the BBC World Service with What in the World. You can find more episodes from What in the World on the BBC World Service YouTube channel, where you can also see us chatting away in the studio and share your comments too. And we're on Instagram at BBC What in the World. I'm Hannah Gelbart, and I hope that this episode has brought back some warm and comforting memories of your own.

26:18to cede the floor to China on clean energy. Listen to The Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.