Scientists find mind trick that unlocks lost memories

Published in Scientific Reports, part of the Nature journal group, the research is the first to show that adults can access early memories more effectively after temporarily viewing themselves with a childlike version of their own face.

How the "Enfacement Illusion" Reconnects Mind and Body

Neuroscientists at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in Cambridge led the study, which involved 50 adult volunteers. The experiment used what is known as an "enfacement illusion," a technique that helps people feel as though another face they see on a screen is actually their own reflection.

Each participant watched a live video of their own face that was digitally modified with an image filter to resemble how they might have looked as a child. As participants moved their heads, the on-screen image mirrored their movements, creating the sensation that the childlike face was truly theirs. A control group experienced the same setup but viewed their unaltered adult faces.

After completing the illusion, participants were asked to take part in an autobiographical memory interview designed to prompt recollections from both their early life and the previous year.

A Clear Boost in Childhood Memory Recall

Researchers measured how much detail participants included when describing their episodic autobiographical memories. These are the kinds of memories that allow a person to mentally relive past experiences and "travel back in time" within their own mind.

The findings revealed that people who saw the younger version of themselves remembered significantly more detailed events from childhood than those who saw their regular adult face. The results provide the first evidence that subtle changes in bodily self-perception can influence how deeply we access distant memories.

Unlocking the Brain-Body Connection in Memory

According to the researchers, this discovery sheds new light on how our perception of the body interacts with memory. It could eventually lead to new methods for accessing forgotten or hard-to-reach memories, including those from the period known as "childhood amnesia," which typically covers the first few years of life.

Lead author Dr. Utkarsh Gupta, who conducted the study during his PhD at Anglia Ruskin University and now serves as a Cognitive Neuroscience Research Fellow at the University of North Dakota, explained: "All the events that we remember are not just experiences of the external world, but are also experiences of our body, which is always present.

"We discovered that temporary changes to the bodily self, specifically, embodying a childlike version of one's own face, can significantly enhance access to childhood memories. This might be because the brain encodes bodily information as part of the details of an event. Reintroducing similar bodily cues may help us retrieve those memories, even decades later."

Reimagining the Self to Revisit the Past

Senior author Professor Jane Aspell, head of the Self & Body Lab at Anglia Ruskin University, added: "When our childhood memories were formed, we had a different body. So we wondered: if we could help people experience aspects of that body again, could we help them recall their memories from that time?

"Our findings suggest that the bodily self and autobiographical memory are linked, as temporary changes to bodily experience can facilitate access to remote autobiographical memories.

"These results are really exciting and suggest that further, more sophisticated body illusions could be used to unlock memories from different stages of our lives -- perhaps even from early infancy. In the future it may even be possible to adapt the illusion to create interventions that might aid memory recall in people with memory impairments."