We had a Phys Ed teacher in high school named Pete Bourchier and the thing I remember best about him is the way he smelled. Please don’t think I mean that in a negative way, on the contrary. He may not have used excessive splashes of it but Brut was strong stuff and a little went a long way, especially in the closed spaces of the gym. A bottle of the original 1964 vintage is listed on eBay for $299 USD but you can also pick up the current version for $15 or so. (Which I absolutely insist you do, just so you can smellember along with me.)
Brut is an in-your-face masculine aftershave, in a unabashedly old school way. It has been one of the world’s most popular men’s colognes over its 60 plus lifetime. To smell it is to….smell it. Possibly forever.
But Brut’s power over me isn’t about Mr. Bourchier, sweet guy that he was; it’s about that particular smell as a gateway to the 1970s of my experience, complete with the people and places, the emotions and social stresses, and who I was in those days. While it obviously retains some collectible value, I choose to believe Brut’s appeal is for nostalgia in a bottle, time travel contained in green glass.
You might be surprised how much scholarly work has, and is, being conducted into the subject of nostalgia. One of the centres of excellence in this field is the University of Southampton’s Center for Research on Self and Identity should you wish to wade in.
Would love to have you join me on this journey.
Nostalgia is not the same as remembering something from the past; it’s like actually being there for just a moment. It’s often got a tinge of the bittersweet, a bit of longing in the back of the throat and sometimes regret in the nose.
Nostalgic memories inevitably focus on people and your sense of how you relate and belong to and with them. The memories feel important because they connect who you were to who you are now. It’s no coincidence that, in reviewing my many Substack posts, the ones grounded in nostalgia do exactly that for me when I’m writing them. And bittersweet is definitely the aftertaste.
Ordinary memories tell you what happened; nostalgic memories remind you who you are and that you matter. They serve as a psychological resource which reminds you that you have been loved, that your life has had meaning, and that you have a coherent sense of self across time. When it comes to using nostalgia for motivation, or as a therapeutic tool, it’s important to sort the ordinary memories from nostalgic recall.
Clay Routledge co-developed the Southampton Nostalgia Scale His key intellectual contribution is linking nostalgia not just to memory or emotion, but to existential psychology — the study of how people grapple with mortality, meaning, and identity. For Routledge, nostalgia is fundamentally about meaning-making and can be a powerful tool, not just for accessing the past but also for approaching an uncertain future with hope.
While Routledge has largely moved on to other horizons, many researchers continue examining nostalgia as a coping mechanism, rather than the somewhat negatively-tinted descriptor “living in the past”. What’s evolving is an understanding that nostalgia is a complex, mostly adaptive personality trait linked to emotional resilience and embracing community.
Routledge says, nostalgia was not the problem; it was the solution.
From the 17th century when the term “nostalgia” was first coined, through to the 20th, it was believed to be a kind of psychological disorder characterized by depression, languishing and sometimes suicide. The word is beautifully specific in its etymology, composed of the old Greek words nostos (return home) and algos (pain). While researchers believe nostalgia to be a universal process, there is also proof that some people are more nostalgia prone than others.
I am one of them. In fact, I am someone who also is prone to anticipatory nostalgia, a kind of longing for the return of something that is still in place, for things that still are. Like many teenaged girls I wrote free form “poetry” and journals, which our teachers encouraged. In one remnant, exhumed from the Vesuvius of boxes in the basement, I find this tortured gem from June of Grade 12. The research world had yet to coin the term, anticipatory nostalgia, but here I am/was!
Being nostalgia prone is something I’ve only recognized recently in myself, i.e. understood that not everyone is like this. Now I am learning it is not just a response to life; it’s a resource for better living.
While some research shows a correlation between being nostalgia prone and being neurotic, most studies find the neurotic chicken goes in search of the nostalgic egg, and not the other way around.
This tendency comes with lots of benefits such as high affective empathy, meaning we are better at feeling what you feel rather than understanding what you think. We tend to be more optimistic and have more self-esteem so nostalgia becomes a tool for the future and not just a way to remember the past. We prioritize social connection. We use the past to energize our striving for the future. When we’re lonely we use nostalgic memories to bolster a sense of connection and support. We donate more to charity and are willing to help strangers. Having a sense of meaning, thanks to nostalgia, takes the edge off the fear of death.
Not surprisingly, nostalgic people age more successfully, partly from their connections but also from the earlier connections and meaning they can access. Maybe that’s why we all become more nostalgic as we age; something in us knows it’s a socioemotional strategy to soften the blows.
By the way, nostalgia prone people who suffer from chronic pain seem to have higher pain tolerance. And that’s not the only biological component. People with a specific serotonin transporter gene variation (5-HTTLPR) tend to be more nostalgia-prone.
Nostalgia isn’t just old movies and scratchy records. It’s an increasingly common tool of marketing, from McDonald’s bringing back its original Happy Meal packaging for adults, to product placement in the 1980s setting of Stranger Things. Marketers rely on studies which have found 50% of adults say they are more likely to buy something which makes them feel nostalgic AND they’ll pay 10 to 15% more for the opportunity.
Freya India, author of the new book “Girls”, wrote a truly lovely piece called “The Time We Never Knew” which introduced me to the term anemoia, nostalgia and longing for a time you had NOT experienced. In her essay she describes Gen Z as an entire generation wishing it had lived in a time before they were born, when they weren’t enslaved by phones and social media, all of which got in the way of living free. In her words, “we never felt the freedom to grow up clumsily; to be young and dumb and make stupid mistakes without fear of it being posted online.”
Current research is looking at inducing nostalgia, through music, smells and other triggers, as a way of addressing the explosion of mental illness associated with loneliness, and perhaps even dementia. So back to Brut, cut grass and fresh baked bread for a second and why they could be just the ticket.
Smell is the most powerful sensory trigger for memory because it is neurologically unique from sight, hearing, and touch. The other senses are routed through the thalamus, which then sends the signals on to the cortex which deciphers them. Smell routes the signal, let’s call it Brut, directly to the olfactory bulb which is a short-cut to the amygdala (emotion) and the hippocampus (memory creation and storage). If you’ve ever wondered, this is exactly why smells trigger memories that feel immediate and emotionally saturated in ways that a photo of that event cannot. So cool, huh?
Diving even deeper into this rabbit hole, this is called the Proustian phenomenon, or memory effect, and, for all of you who crave a copy of his “À la recherche du temps perdu”, here’s a free PDF to download.
So there’s a passage in the hefty tome describing the smell and taste of a pastry dipped in tea and the flood of vivid childhood memories which ensues.
Smell triggered memories often come from the first decade of life; they have incredible staying power, likely due to the pace of neural development in children, which floods the aforementioned amygdala and hippocampus with great strength. Repeated exposures to those smells, for example, newly mown grass, reactivate the encoding rather than overwriting it.
Smelmories are more emotionally intense and vivid. They feel more like going backwards in time, rather than simply remembering a time, AND they often come upon you by surprise, rather than being called up on demand.
Music is another powerful induction tool for accessing nostalgia and is often used in research and in long term care homes where music from the residents’ youth invokes a much greater sense of well-being than “serious” music which older people are “supposed” to like.
It would open too many cans of worms, my using music to induce your nostalgia, so instead, this week’s video is a scene from a TV show, specifically Mad Men which, it can be argued, is entirely nostalgia driven— from the time period itself to the fashions, decor, music, social behaviours (Remember smoking? Day drinking at work?) and gender roles and relationships. Let’s have the yummy, but flawed, Don Draper take us back on the carousel.
Until next time, hold those memories close.
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