Whether it is a historical event, memories, nostalgia or family history, there is no doubting that humans have a deep and long-standing fascination with the past. But why is this?
This is a big rooted question, but a lot of our fascination with the past lies in wanting or possibly needing to understand the unknown. However, what we do know from science is that humans have a curious nature which is partly due to evolution. The background of this curiosity relates to ‘neoteny’, which is the “retention of juvenile features”. It thus translates that as a species, we are more child-like than other mammals, providing us with a child's curiosity and a capacity to learn. Therefore, evolution has made us inquisitive creatures who want to continuously learn and improve our knowledge of the world, explaining why we are often intrigued by the past and what we, as a species, want to find answers to.
When considering our interest in historical events of the past, our fascination with certain events or periods often changes when it is relevant to us. Understandably, at the present, there has been a huge spike of interest in the historically significant event of ‘The Spanish Flu’, with historians and scientists alike researching the effects and consequences of people’s reactions during the 1918-20 pandemic and how this can be compared to our responses to Covid-19. For instance, during the Spanish Flu pandemic, a community in Bristol Bay, Alaska, managed to minimise the number of cases of the flu. They banned public gatherings, closed schools and shut off all access to the village in what was a simplified version of the restrictions that are currently in place at the moment to stop the coronavirus spreading. This is very much an example of history repeating itself, one in which it is often through the repetition of events that people’s interest becomes sparked once more.
However, human fascination of the past does not just involve what we don’t know but also our attraction to our own past. This is where the term ‘nostalgia’ springs to mind. When we look back at our past, it is often an idealised version of something we want it to be, not what it actually was. According to the neurologist and psychiatrist, Alan R. Hirsch in his report, “Nostalgia: A Neuropsychiatric Understanding,” nostalgia is a yearning for an idealized past, “a longing for a sanitized impression of the past, what in psychoanalysis is referred to as a screen memory”, but it is not a “true recreation of the past, but rather a combination of many different memories, all integrated together, and in the process all negative emotions filtered out.” Thus, when it comes to our nostalgic memories, it explains why we often spend hours contemplating and absorbed in the illusion of it.
Therefore, this illustrates why different aspects of the past have fascinated and intrigued humans for thousands of years and will most certainly continue to do so in the future.
by Tara Bradbury
