The Therapy of Nostalgia
7 November 2023 - Hubert Mansion
There was a time when our size, freedom and playfulness allowed us to live close to the ground.
Close to smells, grasses, insects and worms. We jumped in the mud, swallowed the dirt. We met living beings we'd lost touch with, lots of little people like us. Trees were refuges, samaras were helicopters, newts were trophies.
And sometimes, all it takes is a single scent to transport us back to this world. The smell of humus, for example, which we're now too big today to smell. That of dead leaves and mown grass.
The ancients believed that, because of its physical proximity to the brain, the nose was the center of feelings. Today, we know that our olfaction is the only sensory system to have direct projections to the limbic system. This is why the smell-emotion link is so strong in humans. As information only reaches the cortex afterwards, smells first immerse us in emotion before being deconstructed by our reason: we are transported before we know why.
So why not make use of this faculty? Nostalgia therapy enables elderly people who are no longer able to move around in nature to let nature come back to them and, with it, all the memories attached to it. Thanks to nostalgia, feelings of loss are alleviated, and people who have disappeared reappear furtively. Sometimes all it takes is a handful of earth, or the smell of a mushroom, to bring back relatives and childhood friends, and with them the whole of childhood and its newts.
The next time we go to the forest, why not bring back a handful of scents for those who can no longer get there, and fragrance retirement homes with them?
Hubert Mansion is the cofounder of l’Université dans la Nature.
Philosopher and writer, he is notably the author of Réconcilier, vers une identité environnementale (Nullius in Verba, 2023) and presents the series La nature et les mots (Youtube).
