The Nostalgia Factory: Memory, Time and Ageing

  • Douwe Draaisma
Yale University Press: 2013. 9780300182866 | ISBN: 978-0-3001-8286-6

In 1688, Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined the term nostalgia to describe the clinical symptoms of homesickness. Hofer linked the Greek words nostos, for homecoming, and algia, for pain. Nostalgia could even be life-threatening, he noted. In The Nostalgia Factory, psychologist Douwe Draaisma touches on this phenomenon in his exploration of memory and ageing, which draws on scientific work and anecdotal case studies.

He tells of the Dutch emigrants after the Second World War who, crippled by homesickness, later found that return offered no respite: 'home' no longer matched their memories of it. He describes the twentieth-century emigration agencies as 'nostalgia factories'. But the real nostalgia factory, he says, is time — which “makes emigrants of us all”. In old age, memories are all that remain of the land of our youth, even if we never left home. His beautifully written book attempts to capture the nebulous essence of reminiscence in eight elegant, authoritative essays.

Draaisma's style is both literary and scientific. It calls to mind the works of Oliver Sacks, who popularized neuroscience through the intriguing stories of his neurological patients. (In fact, one of Draaisma's essays is based on a conversation with Sacks about “what time does to memories and what memories do to time”.) But Draaisma's style is perhaps the more poetic, which is what makes the powerful insights in his book so penetrating.

It is disconcerting to learn from Draaisma how unstable and adrift our own biographies are: we constantly reconstruct our lives as our memories are refiltered through new experiences. Draaisma offers both reassurance and warnings. Forgetting names rarely foretells dementia, and many old people who describe themselves as forgetful have a well-functioning memory when tested objectively. But claims that food supplements, enriched environments or computer training programs can halt the natural process of harmless age-related forgetfulness are hokum. “Anyone who thinks that such tricks ... can actually give them a better memory probably also thinks they would be able to walk better if they used a walking frame,” notes Draaisma.

For many, The Nostalgia Factory will be what Draaisma refers to as a 'decisive' book, one that changes one's perspective on life. Or maybe that would be true only for the young? Because in this book we also learn about the 'reminiscence-curve bump'.

Modern psychological research into reminiscences uses cue words — such as 'flag' or 'circus' — to prompt memories in elderly people, and researchers then date these to the year they happened. The number of memories recalled for each age, beginning at age three or four, follows a predictable pattern. Numbers rise to a peak at around 20 years old, then fall rapidly, flattening out at an alarmingly low level well before middle age. The curve rises again in later life, when people recall things simply because they happened recently. Middle age barely registers.

So it is not surprising that most people, if asked to name a decisive book, cite one they read before they were 23 — a time they will also describe, unprompted, as 'their era', when pop music was best. Its reflection can be seen in almost all autobiographies. In Peeling the Onion (Harville Secker, 2007), Nobel-prizewinning author Günter Grass devotes the majority of pages on the first 30 years of his life to those between the ages of 17 and 21.

Draaisma argues that the bump in the reminiscence curve has less to do with the ability of the young adult brain to store memories efficiently and more to do with the quality of memories accrued as we set out on independent adult life. Indeed, the bump advanced by more than a decade in a study of people who had migrated in their mid-thirties. Sacks, who emigrated from England to the United States in the 1960s at the age of 27, muses in his conversation with Draaisma that when he recorded his own year-by-year reminiscences during long driving trips, his tapes for the 1970s overflowed, but thereafter the length of the tape “decreased almost linearly”.

Rigorous psychological research into the reminiscence phenomenon, whether healthy or distorted, is relatively new. This short book shows that it can reveal much about who we are at different stages of our lives.