Sometimes when I have a night at home alone, I time travel. My mode of travel is music.

      Sometimes I travel to the 1970s, sometimes the 1980s. I was born in 1961, so my music coming of age largely happened in the mid- to late 1970s. Over the years, I’ve sometimes felt cheated that I wasn’t older during the ‘60s to experience the Beatles, but I’ve made peace with that and have embraced the ‘70s and ‘80s as my decades—bad hair and clothes and all.

      To travel to the ‘70s, I select the “70s Rock Radio” station on my Pandora account. Within minutes, I’m back in middle school (America’s “Sister Golden Hair”) or high school (Kansas’s “Carry on Wayward Son”).

      Hearing the Commodores’ “Brick House” sends me to my high school cafeteria, where we’d pull that song up on the jukebox and line dance during lunch. The nuns at my all-girl Catholic school didn’t quite know what to do about our dancing; they stood on the sidelines, arms folded, frowning.

      Songs I hear on this station frequently take me back to my first rock concert—the “Day of Rock and Roll” at the Louisiana Superdome on June 10, 1979, where I saw Boston, Heart, Van Halen and Blue Oyster Cult, among others. That concert kicked off a string of concerts in college: Fleetwood Mac (I had just had my wisdom teeth removed and I still remember the painful feeling of the bass reverberating in my jaw), the Doobie Brothers, The Cars, Bruce Springsteen, The Police.

      When I want to go back to my college years, I have several Pandora stations in my account that’ll take me back to the early 80s: “REM Radio,” “Talking Heads Radio,” “The Jam Radio.”

      Back then on Saturday nights, my friends and I often made the hour-long drive from Baton Rouge to New Orleans to go to Andy Capps, a bar/dance club on the corner of Carrollton Avenue and Canal Street. [There’s even a Facebook group called “I was at Andy Capps in the Eighties” with over 1,000 members. According to this Facebook page, it was “the premiere alternative/punk club in New Orleans with the greatest DJ ... Uncle Wayne. It marked the height of alternative music and fashion in New Orleans as well as being a destination for some of the most creative people.”]

      We danced the night away to songs like The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” Madness’s “Our House,” and U2’s “I Will Follow.”

      Why do I go back to these particular decades in my past? I think some recent research on nostalgia offers some answers. For a long time, people thought nostalgia was a bad thing. But more recent research suggests that nostalgia may have benefits: It can help us discover purpose in life; boost our self-esteem; and encourage us to concentrate on being authentic to ourselves, rather than being influenced by external expectations.

      And it can make us happier. As memory researcher Charan Ranganath notes in Why We Remember, music can be a powerful cue for episodic memories (a type of long-term memory that involves recollecting specific events or experiences from a person’s life, as opposed to facts a person memorizes). He goes on to state that nostalgia is among the most powerful ways that episodic memory shapes our daily experiences, and thinking back to happy experiences can improve our self-confidence and mood.

      When people travel back to the past, they tend to go back to the time when they were between the ages of 10 and 30; Ranganath calls this the “reminiscence bump.” When we listen to music from that period of our lives, we feel a sense of meaning and are connecting to an idealized sense of who we are.

      I know life in the ‘70s and ‘80s wasn’t perfect by any stretch and I’m certain I’m idealizing my memories of those days, but right now, I get a bit of comfort—if only for a couple of hours—from going back to those decades when hope seemed to be on the horizon.

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Sharon Barrell is a retired technical editor who lives in Durham, NC. After graduating from LSU in the 1980s, she moved to Chapel Hill, NC, to pursue a master's degree at the University of North Carolina. She was thrilled to find a vibrant and extremely cool music scene in Chapel Hill and to spend many a night at the legendary Cat's Cradle.