If you, myself, or any other Amiga user who originally used an Amiga in the late '80s and early '90s were placed in an FMRI and then you, me, or any of them engaged in their favourite use of the Amiga i.e. playing a game, modifying the GUI/MUI, coding; the areas of the brain that would light up would be the same as those relating to nostalgia.
Sure, when I'm playing a game of Cannon Fodder, the nostalgic response would trigger.
BUT (and it's a big but)....
So would the part of the brain governing enjoyment. The fact that there are nostalgic impulses in the brain does not over-ride or replace the same impulse that were triggered in the first place. It's not just nostalgic, it's an enjoyment. If you take away the nostalgic influence, and put us in the FMRI right now, it would still trigger the enjoyment parts of the brain.
For instance: if I play Cannon Fodder now, I get a nostalgic "glow", and also enjoyment from playing it. But if I fire up a game I've never played before, such as "Defender of the Crown", I just get the enjoyment. There is no nostalgia as I've not done it before.
"Ah!", you're probably thinking, "but the association is still there as you're using the same computer".
But what if I play it on a different computer? Is it still nostalgia? I'm not using the same computer, nor the same game. It's a new experience to me. Does that stop me enjoying it? Of course not. Maybe you'd say that I associate the different computer with my old one, but we're getting a bit tenuous here.
Maybe you'd say that the technology reminds me of the time, and it's the time I'm nostalgic for.... but in that case what about youngsters? My wife was playing Sonic recently, and she never had Sonic and was born in 1990. Was it nostalgia? Of course not, she grew up for the most part in the 2000's. When she enjoys an Amiga game, is she nostalgic? No, she just enjoys it. Heck, she loves playing Wizard War on my Dragon 32 and she's about 8 years younger that game!
And now we come to another point. When I was growing up, I wasn't coding PCI drivers for Amigas in ANSI C. I was using Sinclair BASIC to write little games and stuff. The two are completely different, I never did these things back then, so how can I get nostalgic? My AmigaOS 4 machine is completely different to what I was using back then, the only similarity is the OS, but even that is
far advanced from what I had in the 90's.
Sure, nostalgia plays a part in many uses of the Amiga, but NOT ALL of them.
Call me defensive, delusional, whatever, but sweeping generalisations about everybody in any one group is not good psychology! Just because one person in a set associates using an Amiga with his childhood does
not mean that the same holds true for the rest of us. We are all different. As a psychologist you will know how complicated the brain can be. There are any number of sensory experiences associated with our actions, nostalgia is but one of a million.
Saying that everybody has the same reason for using a particular computer is completely indefensible. You might as well blame it on our parents.