From Nostalgia to Insight

Any casual attempt to look at the past, sparked by a specific sensory input, brings up certain memories that are evoked, memories you can visualize in clear, vivid detail, accompanied by an intoxicating, bittersweet feeling that they exude. These tinted memories are as strong as they seem because they’re packed with unprocessed emotional content. Because of their volatile nature, they don’t just sit there; they slowly seep into the subconscious, and slowly but steadily, they grow more salient, triggering cognitive biases. The contents of the memory, highlighted by the mind’s focus, pull you in, so you end up chasing the emotional impact left behind by the memory after its occurrence. Now that the mind is cognitively biased, tuned to scan the variables in your environment for those little triggers that resemble the memory, it tries to look for, recognize, find, and make patterns like the ones that happened back then in the memory. When looking back at it, even just a glance gives a...