Preview

John Tierney Nostalgia

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
285 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
John Tierney Nostalgia
In “What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows,” columnist John Tierney argues that people benefit from nostalgia and that nostalgia “makes us a bit more human.” Using testimonial evidence from multiple scientists, Tierney conveys his message by giving authority and importance to his argument by backup from experiments and scientific individuals (Dr. Sedikides, Tim Wildschut, etc.) who are more knowledgeable than the common man and thus would be more likely to know the true nature of nostalgia. Testimonial evidence (when “researchers found that people in a cold room were more likely to nostalgize than people in warmer rooms.”) and scientific data are used in order to show people the importance of nostalgia, and Tierney obtains

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    Shoeless Joe Jackson was banned from baseball by Judge Landis and the fight to have him reinstated still rages on. W.P. Kinsella, author of New York Times Best Selling Novel, Shoeless Joe, expresses his feelings about a time in history when baseball was heart-pounding and thrilling to go and watch Joseph Jefferson Jackson play ball. In Kinsella’s heartwarming story he displays many types of rhetorical devices such as, nostalgia; a desire to return in thought or fact to a former time.…

    • 293 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Steven Herrick demonstrates that a single event in our past can greatly affect they way in which we interact and perceive…

    • 680 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    He gives examples of old memories that the author, as well as the audience, when he says “We…

    • 658 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    There is a fine line between holding on to something sacred to you and becoming obsessive over it. Nostalgia can be a beautiful thing. Afterall, it triggers a sense of happiness and bliss within the individual reminiscing on the past event or thing. Though in some cases nostalgia can be quite crippling to one's life. It can prevent an individual from being able to move on from the past as a result of the euphoric feeling it gives off. In the documentary, The Rock-afire Explosion, a man by the name of Chris Thrash is heavily focused on throughout the film because of his obsession over everything that involves the The Rock-afire Explosion. The Rock-afire explosion was an animatronic band that performed throughout the ‘80s for children at an…

    • 962 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The piece foregrounds and gives “textual prominence” (Huckin, 1997, p. 82). to the depiction of love through both a fabled lens and a scientific lens. The descriptive comparison of the symbolism “hearts and doves, stars and fireworks” with “functional magnetic resonance imaging” highlights how contemporary relationships are no longer a fairytale experience, or specifically “aren’t nearly as pretty.”…

    • 257 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Learning to deal with, and share the memories from a lifetime ago is important. “The communities of memory that tie us to past also turn us toward the future as communities of hope,”2 Bellah explains. By remembering the past we see the pain, the misfortune, the danger, and the list could go on and on; but we also see hope for a better tomorrow. Recalling the bad, while looking at a problem facing the present, reminds us we are stronger than we think. Just as the communities each of us live in faced hardship to get to the place they are now, they will face even more, but are stronger now than they were at the beginning. This is because, “… collective memory is a source of social strength.”3 The strength of the nation, city,…

    • 676 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    History Fiftieth Gate

    • 488 Words
    • 2 Pages

    defined as “the faculty by which events are recalled or kept in mind”. Thus history…

    • 488 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    How Friends Ruin Memory

    • 478 Words
    • 2 Pages

    “Because we are social animals, our memory of the past is constantly being revised to fit social pressures.” (Pg. 217)…

    • 478 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Asparagus, a Love Story: Healthier Eating Could be just a False Memory Away was an experiment to test if false memories can be implanted under certain conditions or to prove if it's just a belief. In order to test it it had to broken down into several steps. In the first part of the study 128 undergraduate students mostly female (n=63) with a mean average of 20.8 were randomly assigned to the “love” group to eat asparagus as children. In order to make a distinction is to ask the subjects whether they had a memory or belief about the critical false event. Those who received the suggestion were more confident that they had loved asparagus the first time they tried it, which lead to increased liking of asparagus at the end of the experiment.…

    • 282 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Memories can be formed in many different ways. Often times they are images and sensations that one can associate with a time or event in the past. A certain smell can have the effect if transporting you to a special place that you remember dearly. The creation and retention of memory is both conscious and unconscious, with the end result being a stored piece of information that can be dug up at any given time. More intriguing are the memories an individual can have about a time or place they have never experienced in their lives. In this case, it could be said that these are more the work of preconceptions and assumptions. Through word of mouth someone born in the 1990’s can overtime develop an image of what they believe the 1920’s to have been like. Pictures, printed works and live recordings from the time itself, further support the stories that are passed down through the generations. A picture of 19th century European soldier may allow us to perceive what life may have been like at that time by visualizing his clothes and expressions. Beyond this mostly factual depiction of the past is something far more powerful. Cinema. The modern movie screen is a medium that recreates all sorts of era’s, landscapes and scenarios, from the daily life of an ant, to the farthest reaches of the universe. In Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump, we are given a look into America during a time of radical change. Through the eyes of a simpleton, Forrest Gump, Zemeckis guides us through the social and political goings on of the 1960’s. Within his depiction of the 1960’s, we are able to form opinions of the time. Forrest is a symbol of the struggle to hold onto 50’s America, during an era marked with race riots, distrust of the government and the Vietnam War. In this essay I will attempt to connect the events of Forrest’s life as we see then in the film, to the collective memory that many American’s have regarding the 1960’s. By encompassing crooked political action, aggressive anti-war…

    • 2430 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Flashbulb Memories

    • 2317 Words
    • 10 Pages

    "Our past is preserved in a variety of memories of very different nature" (Salaman, 1970)…

    • 2317 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    History and memory does generate compelling and unexpected insights, and this is explicitly conveyed and explored in the Smithsonian website created by the American government, as well as in How to Tell a True War Story by Tim O’Brien. History is the compilation of events and peoples perspective in events, all meshed up into a montage to create a definitive account of events. Both texts demonstrate the fact that history and memory are directly linked, and memories of history are perceptions tainted an emotional aspect. Ultimately history and memory are conveyed as existing in an intrinsic relationship that compose both collective and individual experiences.…

    • 321 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Synthesis Paper - Culture

    • 1080 Words
    • 5 Pages

    How much of your life has changed because of the culture you’ve been used to? Think about everything you 've ever done in your life. All your actions and emotions towards things–how naturally did they come? The cultural background of a person sways him or her to act in certain ways. Culture is the source of what one comes out to be, even after many years from what he or she first saw of a culture. A person’s culture affects all of his or her life and even shapes who the individual is now.…

    • 1080 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Analysis of Memento Movie

    • 425 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan is a physiological thriller film that retells the events that have led up to the protagonist, a man named Leonard Shelby murdering a man named Teddy. The film has received critical acclaim for its unique time sequence, which goes in both reverse and chronological order. The temporal structure of the film serves two proposes: to mimic the process of human of recollection, and to allow the viewer to understand the nature of anterograde amnesia, an ailment that Leonard Shelby suffers from. The ambiguity in the ending of Nolan’s work raises many questions about the reliability of human memory. Throughout the movie, the audience is forced to ask repeatedly if the “memory” of the protagonist can be trusted, and eventually doubt the fidelity of human memory as a whole. In Memento, Leonard’s methods of record keeping assert that human memory can be deceptive, and that individuals create false images by modifying memories over time.…

    • 425 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Severson, and Jolina H. Ruckert discuss the impact on humans of how technological nature is coming to replace actual nature in the essay. In the essay, they come to the conclusion that this replacement causes changes in the physical and psychological well-being of the human species. Kahn, Severson, and Ruckert state that nature is imperative to have in human lives. The authors did a study in which they found that simply looking outside of a window reduces heart rate which in turn reduces stress. Near the end of the essay, the authors discuss the issue of Environmental Generational Amnesia. This is a condition that humans may face in which, because of "adapting gradually to the loss of actual nature and to the increase of technological nature, humans will lower the baseline across generations for what counts as a full measure of the human experience and of human flourishing"(Kahn, Severson, and Ruckert, 37). In a study, they figured out that technological nature is better than no nature at all. And they also know that humans have an evolutionary need to affiliate with nature, so we either have to adapt to technological nature, or go extinct. The authors know that talking to people about these environmental issues is becoming harder as most people aren 't aware of or simply don 't believe that they are a problem. I think that this was a very important study to do and shows people the importance and necessity of going out into…

    • 1062 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays