Looking at photos of good times with family or friends provokes nostalgia, an emotion that, although bittersweet, is also positive. Nostalgia can help reduce pain, and now a team of Chinese scientists has revealed the brain mechanism behind this relief.
Its description is published in the journal JNeurosci and, according to researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, nostalgia decreases the activity of brain areas related to pain and reduces subjective evaluations of thermal pain.
Specifically, the team led by Kong Yazhuo found that the thalamus, a brain region essential for pain modulation, is also related to the analgesic effect associated with nostalgia, according to two press releases from the Society for Neuroscience, in the United Statesand the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one’s past, is a self-conscious social emotion, perhaps bittersweet, but predominantly positive. “This helps us maintain a positive psychological state by counteracting the negative impact of difficult situations,” the study authors explain.
Images to measure nostalgia
The adaptive functions of nostalgia are many and one of its effects is pain relief. To reach their conclusions, the scientists measured the brain activity of adults with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they rated levels of nostalgia from snapshots and rated pain from thermal stimuli.
Nostalgic images depicted scenes and objects from ordinary childhood, such as a popular candy, cartoon TV show, or backyard game, and “control” snapshots depicted scenes and items from modern life.
Viewing nostalgic images reduced pain scores compared to viewing the other images.
In addition, looking at nostalgic photos also decreased activity in the left lingual gyrus and parahippocampal gyrus, two brain regions involved in pain perception.
Most importantly, the researchers say, the anterior thalamus encoded nostalgia and the posterior parietal thalamus encoded pain perception.
Thus, the activity of the thalamus, a brain region involved in the transmission of information between the body and the cortex, was linked to both nostalgia and pain classifications, describe the authors, who explain that the thalamus can integrate information from nostalgia and transmit it to the pathways of pain.
“The thalamus plays a key role as a central functional link in the analgesic effect,” summarizes Zhang Ming.
Homesickness may be a way to relieve low-level pain, such as headaches or mild clinical pain, without the need for drugs, the authors conclude.
This study sheds light on the neural mechanisms underlying nostalgia-induced pain relief, “providing new perspectives for the development and improvement of non-pharmacological psychological analgesia.”
The new Science Law, which will be approved by the Council of Ministers in the coming weeks, will include the right to compensation for predoctoral and postdoctoral researchers with a valid contract, the Minister of Science and Innovation, Diana Morant, announced this Friday.
Although the draft bill already contemplated, for the first time, the right to compensation equivalent to twelve days of salary per year of service, this would only have been applied to new contracts signed after the entry into force of the regulations. .
Culture, art, music, painting or dance seriously benefit health and science supports it. Listening to music helps control the level of glucose in the blood, playing it improves the immune system and stress management, and painting or sculpture help with depressive states. Art also reduces the side effects of cancer treatment, including drowsiness, poor appetite, shortness of breath, and nausea.
Culture benefits health, backed by science
In addition, music or clowns reduce anxiety, pain and blood pressure in emergency situations.
Who says it is the regional office for Europe of the World Health Organization that for the first time it has carried out a large-scale study (Health Evidence Network ), in which it analyzes 3,000 scientific publications on the links between art and health and well-being, and for For the first time, it calls on governments and authorities to implement policies that improve collaboration between the health and artistic sectors..
“The examples cited in this groundbreaking WHO report show the ways in which the arts can address insidious or complex health problems such as diabetes, obesity and poor mental health. They view health and wellness in a broader social and community context, and offer solutions that common medical practice has so far been unable to address effectively.”
These words are from the doctor Östlin Piroska, WHO regional director for Europe, during the presentation of the report in 2019, which took place very shortly before the pandemic broke out.
The WHO declaration is a real boost for the organizations and associations that have been working in this field, as is the case of the Culture Foundation in Vena, which has had the “boldness” to open a new and different MIR call, that of the Resident Internal Musicians.
Culture and Health: Resident Internal Musicians
The project has resulted in the hiring of 46 musicians, who previously trained, have offered more than 2,000 live musical sessions for patients of the Hospital October 12.
With the help of seven department heads from different specialties, a scientific study is now being prepared on the results, which should already be almost finished, but which the pandemic has delayed.
This is one of the varied, careful and original initiatives carried out by the aforementioned Foundation.
Its promoter and President, Juan Alberto Garcia de Cubas, is an architect, museographer, cultural manager and music curator, who decided to undertake this adventure after an experience linked to the illness of a loved one and verified first-hand the transforming capacity of art in people who are, like the sick, in a vulnerable situation.
the power of paint
He and his team also had the artistic idea of making Goya just another visitor to the sick.
The exhibition presents reproductions of works from the Prado Museum. Rural prints, costumbristas or featuring children, collect the cartoons that the artist painted for the Royal Tapestry Factory, commissioned by Carlos III to decorate the walls of the palace with “playful and pleasant affairs”.
The images, explains the Foundation, are accompanied by texts specially created to connect with the experience that the patient and his family are going through, as well as that of the health personnel, and propose approaches that range from the educational to the emotional and the popular To the deep.
«Goya in a hospital? It tells us about illness as an opportunity, convalescence as an occasion for self-knowledge, illnesses as a time to unleash affection, going through a hospital as a new way of contacting culture to improve the health and well-being of the person».
Sample photo Goya in a Hospital? of the Culture Foundation in Vena
Comics and pandemic
The comic, explains Juan Alberto García de Cubas, is one of the latest protagonists of the initiatives of Culture in Vena, which has been carried out coinciding with the pandemic.
On their website they state that “beyond the specific stories about the coronavirus, this initiative takes advantage of the creators’ gaze to reflect on everything that the pandemic has brought to the surface, and what we considered “normal”:
Social inequalities, treatment of the elderly, the importance of care and roles of gender, the threat of individual freedom and democracies, technological acceleration, the role of culture, awareness of the imminent environmental crisis…”
In his conversation with EFEsalud, García de Cubas has defended that the health sector must have culture as an ally, as a tool, and has a responsibility, the same that cultural institutions must have towards the health of citizens.
“The cultural sector is a public health resource and this is so with capital letters.”
Hence the importance of institutional and political support for these initiatives, a field in which the foundation has also set to work.
(In September 2020, in the midst of a health crisis, the Spanish Senate approved an institutional declaration urging the Government of Spain to declare culture as an essential asset. In it, it was stated verbatim that “we must include art and culture in the framework of health care, since music, art and cultural activities produce great benefits for our body and our emotions”).
culture and health
Finally, this architect invites us to add to current medicine, with all its advances and technologies, the concept of health care as something holistic, as medicine was understood tens of thousands of years ago, even linked to certain artistic manifestations and recalls that already in the Paleolithic, a sculpture such as the Venus de Willendorf represented fertility.
Juan Alberto García de Cubas, president of the Culture Foundation in Vena
«In Ancient Egypt, the papyri described certain healing practices through theatrical experiences; in Greece, Pythagoras wrote about the health benefits of music, as did Boethius a little later».
García de Cubas concludes that his foundation also develops similar programs for the populations of small rural communities at risk of depopulation.
“Work is being done to integrate the arts into hospital care, and to make cultural and health institutions aware that there is a common path to travel, which also opens up a new source of jobs for the culture sector.”
The award-winning program Little patients, great readers, has been awarded “for creating a digital library of short stories created by and for patients, for organizing creative writing video workshops for managing emotions, and for helping to improve the mood of patients through reading, in four hospitals in Madrid, Santander and Mallorca.
