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“There’s a rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.

“My first job, I was in-house at a fur company, with this old-pro copywriter, a Greek named Teddy. Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is new. Creates an itch. ... But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product. Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent.

“Teddy told me that in Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine.

“It goes backwards, forwards, takes us to a place where we ache to go again. ... It lets us travel the way a child travels. Round and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.”

-Don Draper, Mad Men

In the seventeenth century, a strange affliction was observed among Swiss soldiery who had been posted in the lowlands of France and Italy. Mentally, the soldiers would exhibit extreme melancholia and anorexia; physically, there would be bouts of weeping and irregular heartbeats.

The soldiers’ malady was attributed to a variety of factors: sharp differentiations in atmospheric pressure wreaking havoc in the brain, evil spirits inhabiting the soldiers’ heads, brain damage caused by the clanging of cowbells – y’know, all those Swiss things. The “Swiss illness” was eventually linked to Kuhreihen, the horn melodies that alpine herdsmen would play as they drove their cattle to pasture. Kuhreihen would provoke in the soldiers an intense longing for home, and accordingly the songs were banned from the military.

In 1688 Swiss doctor Johannes Hoffer coined the term “nostalgia” to describe the affliction, and described it as a “neurological condition of essentially demonic cause.” Into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nostalgia was considered a form of “immigrant psychosis” and a “mentally repressive compulsive disorder.”

However, recent research has shown something surprising: it’s not just weird foreigners who experience nostalgia – we all do! One survey found that 80 per cent of people report feelings of nostalgia at least once a week, and nearly half report it three or four times a week. And the experience of nostalgia is the same, whether it occurs in a European, a South American, or an African.

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Few emotions stir us like nostalgia – that wistful, bittersweet recollection of times past. But for all its power and ubiquity, nostalgia had hardly been studied until 15 or so years ago, and is still quite poorly understood. As a subtle interweaving of memory, imagination and emotion, it is far too complex to be fully explained with our current knowledge of neurobiology. That being said, it appears that we can hazard some fairly plausible guesses about how nostalgia is formed.

A disclaimer: I have zero background in biology, let alone neurobiology, and the following is likely riddled with inaccuracies. I apologise in advance to Otago’s stellar contingent of science snobs, who are likely to take gross and indignant offence to my artsy mangling of their field.

The traditional layperson’s view of memory is of a kind of library or photo album from which individual memories can be selected at will and examined. When new memories are formed, they are filed away for later perusal. Occasionally, a memory will not be used in a while, and will be lost from the archives, either temporarily misplaced or forgotten forever. However, the current view among researchers is that memory is not stored in a database, but created through the repeated firing of certain neurons.

Neurons are connected by synapses – electrical pathways that pass signals from cell to cell – and when a particular synapse is used repeatedly, it strengthens and passes this signal more easily. This initial strengthening creates short-term memory. In order to create long-term memory, the synapse must be strengthened permanently, creating a “trace.” Complex long-term memories consist of patterns of traces that cover large areas of the brain. When these memories are triggered, the synapses fire according to these patterns. So the process of remembering is not a case of looking at a photo in an album; the memory is recreated in real time, and because these patterns are never entirely stable, memories can be creatively altered and reassessed, albeit usually unconsciously.

Most of our episodic memories – memories of events, facts, and autobiographical details – are formed through the hippocampus. However, where the memory has a direct emotional element, the amygdale becomes involved and can “tag” certain memories as emotionally significant. This makes it more likely that a memory trace will form, and that the memory will be more vivid and persistent.

These emotionally-invested stories form a huge part of our identity. The stories of our lives help to structure and inform who we are; deep-seated memories, particularly of our childhood and upbringing, give us a sense of comfort and belonging. As one researcher has put it, “our brains are conservative; they place a value (often an emotional value) on the coherence and stability of old stories and do not easily change them. Humans want to preserve things the way they were; they feel comfortable when the new experiences fit their previous stories.”

Nostalgia, so one theory goes, occurs when these comforting memories are triggered in an environment materially different to that memory. We relive our happy, comforting experience from the past; but this coexists with a sense of disconnection and loss, and thus can cause an overwhelming longing and bittersweet sensation.

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There is a growing literature on the psychology of nostalgia. From a mental illness calling for treatment, its reputation has swelled to the point that nostalgia is now considered psychologically beneficial.

Greek psychologist Constantine Sedikides has been at the forefront of this recent research. Sedikides has found that nostalgia fights, among other things, boredom, loneliness, anxiety and feelings of mortality. By reflecting on our comforting memories, we gain a stronger sense of self and belonging, and this can make life seem more meaningful and death less frightening. Nostalgia also increases goodwill and tolerance, and makes couples feel closer. It has even been shown to make people literally feel warmer.

“Nostalgia makes us a bit more human,” Sedikides told the New York Times. “You end up with a stronger feeling of belonging and affiliation, and you become more generous to others.”

Music is a particularly strong trigger of nostalgia. In a Dutch study, researchers found that listening to songs made people feel not only nostalgic, but physically warm. In another study at North Dakota State University, participants were played hit songs from the past, and afterward were more likely than the control group to say that they felt “loved” and that “life is worth living.”

“Nostalgia serves a crucial existential function,” the researchers concluded. “It brings to mind cherished experiences that assure us we are valued people who have meaningful lives. Some of our research shows that people who regularly engage in nostalgia are better at coping with concerns about death.”

One of the primary purposes of nostalgia appears to be as a coping mechanism during periods of transition: it is reported most commonly in young people who have recently left home, and in old people with one foot in the grave. “Young adults are just moving away from home and/ or starting their first jobs, so they fall back on memories of family Christmases, pets and friends in school,” says Erica Hepper, a psychologist at the University of Surrey. Nostalgia probably lies behind the gratuitous amount of Friends I watched in fifth year (a coping mechanism in the alien and soulless world of studying law), and my recent predilection for Star Wars and Toy Story marathons.

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As the above quote by Don Draper makes clear, the advertising potential of nostalgia is well understood. Nostalgia is a selling point for confectionary, music, boxed sets of old TV shows, failing North Dunedin pubs – you name it. But what about selling ideas?

It’s doubtful that any genre of popular fiction has had a greater effect on the collective consciousness of a nation as Westerns have had on the United States. According to historian David H. Murdoch, “no other nation has taken a time and place from its past and produced a construct of the imagination equal to America’s creation of the West.” In the Old West, men were men and guns were great; rugged self-reliance was the name of the game; and loyalties were clear-cut – never trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders; he can’t even trust his own pants.

This attitude has persevered in the Southwest, crystallising into a fierce blend of individualism, economic libertarianism, and social conservatism. This isn’t always totally consistent – yay for freedom, unless it’s gays marrying – but when viewed as a product of nostalgia, the logic is much clearer. It’s a throwback to a more anarchic time – hence the suspicion of the government – but also to a largely monocultural society, in which difficult questions around diversity did not typically arise. Political figures – particularly Republicans – have become adept at tapping into this nostalgia to push their message.

The use of Western tropes evokes nostalgia despite the fact that nobody alive today directly remembers the Old West. We recall childhood games of Cowboys and Indians, but none of us have protected an honest rancher from a group of outlaws, or had a showdown, or ridden out across the prairie with only our horse for company. The closest we come to reliving a Western is getting drunk in a bar and falling over into a pile of mud. This is probably just as well: as Murdoch points out, the mythic frontier has little to do with reality, which was a far grimmer affair.

As a result, it is tempting to dismiss nostalgia for the Old West – or for any idealised past that we have not personally experienced – as a form of delusion. After all, Michael Jackson pined for the childhood he never had, and he was one messed up mofo. Jackson suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of his father, and in 1995 song “Childhood” he explains that “it’s been my fate to compensate for the childhood I’ve never known ... I’m searching for that wonder in my youth like pirates in adventurous dreams of conquest and kings on the throne.”

Nostalgia for an imagined past often stems from dissatisfaction with the present. Dissatisfaction for the present, accompanied by a lack of faith that things will improve, can negate the positive effects of nostalgia: it can lead to a cynical view of human nature and a less tolerant outlook on society. So far, so Republican.

Then again, yearning for the good old days does not reflect a deprived childhood; it reflects a particular interpretation of our past, which is then tied to a narrative of decline. If we view our childhood as simpler, freer, more picturesque than our present, it is not a case of suppressing our childhood and erecting a new, imagined one in its place, but placing a particular spin on our childhood and romanticising it. So, in short, those who nostalgise for the Old West probably view their childhood as more akin to the idealised frontier, a frontier that the passage of time has eroded. They don’t literally believe they inhabited the frontier, but they do see elements of the Old West in their backstory. Ultimately, it is the creative flexibility of our memories that allows this to happen.

Our identities are formed through the higher regions of our brains, such as the neocortex. The neocortex helps to structure our memory traces into a roughly coherent narrative about who we are and where we come from. These narratives can incorporate the imagery we have learned to associate with our past, and if this imagery is linked to a particular political message, this can give rise to deep-seated attitudes that are hard to shake.

From a liberal perspective, though, the message is still nuts, and airbrushes away the intolerance, violence and misogyny of the Old West. Liberal America has long recognised the importance in countering or subverting the traditional, conservative Western tropes pushed by figures like John Ford and John Wayne. Hence the “revisionist” Western films of the 60s and 70s: 1970’s Little Big Man, for instance, championed Native Americans, while Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) made capitalism the villain. In more recent times, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) denounced the Southwest’s attitude towards immigration and Brokeback Mountain (also 2005) undermined the genre’s intense heteronormativity by presenting that most unthinkable of phenomena, cowboys bumming each other.

All of these films, by challenging the values associated with Western imagery, help to change the idealised view of the frontier into something more nuanced. They stir doubts among conservatives about the proper lessons to draw from their nostalgia for the Old West. All of which goes to show that people aren’t really rational. Don’t appeal to their sense of reason – just hit them in the childhood.

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In order to bring a sense of narrative closure to this feature, let us return to our friend Constantine Sedikides. As Sedikides points out, dwelling on the past can be comforting, and can play an important role in reminding ourselves who we are. But we shouldn’t let our nostalgia for the past detract from our enjoyment of the present.

“Many other people have defined nostalgia as comparing the past with the present and saying, implicitly, that the past was better – ‘those were the days,’” Sedikides says. “But that may not be the best way for people to nostalgise. The comparison will not benefit, say, the elderly in a nursing home who don’t see their future as bright. But if they focus on the past in an existential way – ‘what has my life meant?’ – then they can potentially benefit.

“I think you’ll benefit by nostalgising two or maybe three times a week. Experience it as a prized possession. When Humphrey Bogart says, ‘we’ll always have Paris,’ that’s nostalgia for you. We have it, and nobody can take it away from us. It’s our diamond.”