1. Familiarity
In late August/early September, many people are up and leaving their homes to go to school, relocating for new jobs, or moving for various other reasons. It starts to feel like a cultural variation of the New Year, because many people go through new beginnings. Even with our curious nature as humans, we enjoy consistency. This includes the friends we hang out with to why we might not enjoy the new town we moved to for college or to accept a new job.
Residential mobility isn’t a newly studied topic, especially since the concept of moving frequently and/or temporarily is almost normalized for a certain part of your life. Culturally, we deem it more normal if a 20 year old moves 3 times in the last two years versus if a 45 year old moves 3 times in the last to years. This is probably because we associate moving locations with some sort of symbolic form of change, such as moving to a different state for school.
Shigehiro Oishi, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, studies residential mobility and how it affects our well-being and friendships. He noticed that people with that nomadic lifestyle with really intense feelings of anxiety and loneliness showed what he called the familiarity-liking effect. The familiarity-liking effect, or mere-exposure effect, is essentially when someone prefers an object or place that gives a sense of familiarity versus being very unfamiliar because of their newfound anxiety after moving. Sometimes we find comfort in making friends with people who remind us of old friends from our past; this could also apply to our relationship and dating habits as well.
It makes sense that we’re automatically draw to what is familiar, but why is that? As The Inquisitive Mind noted in their article “Always on the Move: How Residential Mobility Impacts Our Well-Being,” it’s from an evolutionary standpoint. I]nf we have been to a place that is safe from outside threats and we’ve made a home there, we’re going to feel comfortable if we visit a new place that has the same features as our home. This principle alone has ensured our survivability as a species.
If we think about this in a modern sense, then we can equate familiar surroundings to that of fast-food or retail chains. It’s actually very common for individuals who have moved to a new area to spend a little more time at these sort-of familiar locations. Your hometown’s Walmart might be set-up differently than the Walmart at the University Commons, but you know that there’s a produce section, a home goods section, and that registers are typically at the front or at one side of the store. You have these familiar guidelines to connect to your past experiences.
It almost sounds degrading to call it a miniature coping mechanism, but that’s essentially what you’re brain is doing! Being in new situations puts stress on the brain. It takes in information and is constantly assessing its surroundings, because that’s the way we’ve evolved. Having these little pockets of familiarity is almost soothing to at a minuscule level. Like Madeline and I mentioned in the podcast, sometimes small things serve as an anchor and that’s perfectly fine.
So from a neurobiological standpoint, how does our brain determine if something is familiar to us? A press release for a paper published this last summer on EurekAlert called “How the brain recognizes what the eye sees,” gives some insight to how different subregions in our brain work together to determine whether something is familiar or foreign. Researchers at the Salk Institute discovered a little more about how neurons work in an area of the brain called V2 in terms of processing visual information from the eyes. They found that neurons in the V2 region have three ways of processing visual information, dubbed the Quadratic Convolutional Model.
1) They can combine the edges of an object that have similar orientations, or their physical positions in space. This is how we’re able to see the overall shape of an object and if it has hard edges or soft curve, such a distinguishing a cube from a sphere.
2) If a certain edge stimulates a neuron, then the position 90 degrees from that certain edge will be suppressed. This also helps with shape recognition, so if you see a vertical line, the neuron will not send signals to your brain that would allow you to interpret it as a horizontal line.
3) The neurons can also recognize textured surfaces as well as the boundaries between those surfaces. This is determined by recognizing patterns in relation to that object in space, which can be analogous to identifying here the sidewalk ends and the street beings.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that processes such as recognizing routes to get to work involve such heavy communication within your brain. It’s also important to remember that while Madeline and I speak about things that can help you feel better adjusted to a new environment, moving your “home base” can feel overwhelming. Sometimes the biggest factor is time itself, but creating a routine and staying positive can ease your discomfort and — eventually — your new location will feel more like home.
Check out our podcast episode below to hear more about the concept of familiarity!
0:53 — Introduction to the podcast
2:13 — Hosts’ experience with moving to college
4:19 — Neural compressions involved with spatial memory and navigation
6:40 — Déjà vu and recollecting certain details
9:17 — Difference between recognition and familiarity
11:47 — How to adjust to a new environment
18:00 — Contact info
18:28 — Quick recap of points
19:31 — Credits and acknowledgments
