Hi /lit/, I have a question about a psychological phenomenon I've been experiencing my whole life, but I've never heard anyone talk about. It's a category of feelings, but I don't know the word for it. The closest thing would be nostalgia. Think about the way that nostalgia can condense an entire year, if not more, into just a single moment, or a collection of moments. Those moments hold the entire context of the year: the atmosphere, the characters, the feelings, etc, and it all expresses itself as a single kind of feeling inside your mind. And then different periods of your life have the same category of feeling, but they all are represented as different flavors. For a while, I would call them "flavors of nostalgia," for lack of a better term.
But, it occurs to me that I can have these feelings about things I haven't personally experienced. I have an entire collection of them inherited from books, movies, dreams, stories, pictures, etc. As I've grown older, it's become easier to "collect" these feelings from different works of art, and by now I could probably name a hundred unique "flavors". Obviously, nostalgia isn't the proper term, because you can't feel nostalgia for something you haven't experienced, and anyway, nostalgia also has a tendency to be used towards trivial things, like good periods of time in your life.
Is there any name for this phenomena? Does anybody else experience it the way I've described it here? Why does nobody talk about this sort of experience? Do most people just see it as trivial?
I think you would really enjoy My Struggle by Karl Ove Knaugaard
Different parts of your life are associated with different feelings. It seems like the potential feeling you could have are endless, and if you live your life in a routine kind of way, you stop feeling new things.
You're very sentimental about this.
Not sure why it even would be described or pointed out like that. But then again why not. It reminds me of a monologue in the movie "Her" btw.
might want to look into the phenomenology of syntesthesia or something similar
>>7987346
Thanks, I'll check it out.
>>7987378
>feelings
This word feels too simple and all-encompassing to describe what I'm talking about. Like, I'm talking about one specific category of feelings. Do you think that my description isn't accurate to what you've felt? I'll admit that I might be overly-sentimental about these kind of feelings, but I'm still curious if other people experience them the same way.
>>7987396
>synesthesia
I've considered this, but I'm unconvinced that I'm experiencing things in a different way from other people. I think that I might just have developed a different terminology to describe something we all share.
>>7987322
Congratulations, you are a hipster.
I know exactly what you mean. Just curious, do you feel that aesthetics hold more importance or depth to you than they do to most people?
>>7987322
Psych major here. To put it simply: Memories form through emotion and association. We may connect one memory to the memory of another thing. When you remember something you are reconstructing that memory. We usually remember things based on retrieval cues. Emotional moments are easier to consolidate into retrieval ques than small and unimportant details.
To give an example: My second semester of college always draws to mind the same memories. I think of the smell of my "sage and rosemary" Glade air freshener. I think of my new Eclipse mp3 player. I think of playing numerous YGOpro games on my laptop. I think of watchingSteven Universeplease no bully. I also remember watching JJBA later that semester while eating sweet potato. I remember the taste of the vanilla mass gainer that I drank each morning. I remember all the chicken I would eat and the Tabasco chipotle sauce that I would put on it. I remember listening to Daft Punk's "Within" while walking to the playhouse for a rehearsal of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona." I remember the bright colored wallpaper on my new tablet. I remember my first attempt at self-hypnosis and my subsequent interest in mnemonics.
All of those things were drawn from my memory of the sage and rosemary scented Glade air freshener. The scent of the air freshener is the retrieval que for all of those memories.
Cognitive psychology.
I also have this feeling, like a sadness bc the feels I get from something are the moments I will never experience
>>7987490
I think this is one of the best posts on /lit/ I've seen in a while. Thank you, sir.
>>7987512
No problem. I hope it helped.
I think what unifies these different spheres of experience is not explicitly the situations or things that happend in that time, but the way you related to them. The different flavors of nostalgia are, in my opinion, different internal worldviews, different ideas of how the world works, what is important in life and how to relate to it all. That's also why there's this bittersweet feeling when thinking back on it, since there is no way of going back to a mindset you previously had.
>>7987490
Found Proust.
Oh yeah OP, check out In Search of Lost Time at some point. Be warned, it's 4000 pages in total, or something.
>>7987322
source on pic?
>>7987445
>Just curious, do you feel that aesthetics hold more importance or depth to you than they do to most people?
It's hard to say. I think that they might, but that's because film and lit are big hobbies of mine. I can't really say if they are my hobbies because I care about aesthetics a lot, or if I care about aesthetics a lot because they are my hobbies. It's hard to say which came first.
>>7987490
I'm certainly fine with this, but it doesn't really illuminate what I'm describing. What I'm describing is the feeling that is every memory and perception you just described, but condensed. I'm wondering if there's a word for that. Often, a scent or song is a retrieval cue for that condensed feeling, but what is the feeling?
>>7987521
This seems to get at the heart of it. One of my greatest frustrations is actually communicating one of these "flavors of nostalgia" to another person. Art seems like the tool which is used to communicate these perceptions between people. We can't just hear somebody's descriptions, like the memories evoked, and understand them, because there's something much deeper there. It relates to internal worldviews or, like you say, maybe they ARE different internal worldviews. It's hard to say.
>>7987322
Read the book of disquiet by Fernando pessoa op. This is described almost exactly
>>7987567
What is the feeling? You may be referring to a "memory organization packet" which is a collection of scripts. The scripts that you may be referring to would be a series of emotions that could be compacted in an organization packet and retrieved via cue.
