Culture Japan Secret Stuff Smart Doll – Nostalgia

— I was being interviewed by a chap from the BBC who asked me why I still played with Star Wars toys and asked if I felt childish. I replied by asking him whether he owned Star Wars toys. He responded that he stopped playing with toys when he reached the age of 12 as that stuff “was for kids.” I thought to myself, “the creativity in you died the day you stopped playing with toys.”

Unlike a tadpole that is hardwired to shed its tail and grow limbs to become a frog in a process called metamorphosis, humans are not hardwired to shed their interest in toys once they reach the age of 12 – it is society that wires them to do so. Folks who end up following the cookie-cutter life that society has prepared for them will more than likely end up living a life of regret as demonstrated by research known as “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.”

Society makes you feel childish for playing with toys so that you can instead focus on studying to get into a good university, so that you can get a good job, so that you can get a decent salary to take out a mortgage to buy a house (and put some aside for the pension) so that you can go back to work the next day to earn enough to pay off the mortgage and pay the bills – copy and paste for 60 years…

Nostalgia is a term used to describe a yearn for an autobiographical experience from the past. Research shows there are many benefits to experiencing nostalgia, such as immunological, which helps decrease levels of peripheral proinflammatory cytokines. Nostalgia can also contribute to us being more creative, optimistic and give us a sense of feeling younger, which has positive implications for health.
A 2012 study in the journal Memory showed that experiencing nostalgia helped subjects relate their past experiences to the present, enabling them to make greater meaning of their lives.

The study of nostalgia and the search to find its meaning in evolution and why we experience it is still relatively new but from the results of experiments and my research carried out to date, given that the feeling of nostalgia is the strongest when exposed to smells, I hypothesize that nostalgia seems to be connected to when we were hunter-gatherers hundreds of thousands of years ago when we relied on our sense of smell for direction and working out what mushrooms or herbs were beneficial or harmful.

Smells enter the nose and are picked up by the olfactory bulb, which has a strong relationship with the amygdala – the part of the brain that processes emotions, including “Fight or Flight.” Recognizing smells were a matter of life or death for hunter-gatherers.
However, as hunter-gatherers evolved to hunt moving prey (instead of stationary plants), our sense of smell diminished in favor of vision.

I still play with Star Wars toys (LEGO!) and feel particularly nostalgic when playing retro games on my Megadrive, Super Famicom or PC Engine – just thinking about these games machines brings back memories of the early 90’s of when I just started to learn Japanese. Without my interest in the Megadrive, I would not have discovered Japanese culture, there would be no Smart Doll and life would have been very very different.

Smart Doll Nostalgia is a reminder that regardless of whether you are indulging in some nostalgia by watching some retro anime, cosplaying, gaming, playing with LEGO or fashion dolls – those who wield and harness the power of nostalgia are the ones who will gain from its benefits. As for those who try to stop you and tell you that you are childish – pass on your condolences to them and continue doing what you do.