Mind Trick Reveals Technique to Access Forgotten Childhood Memories
Researchers have discovered a fascinating method involving altered body perception that assists in retrieving long-forgotten memories from childhood.
Date: November 3, 2025. Source: Anglia Ruskin University. Summary: A team of scientists determined that adopting a digital representation resembling one’s childlike face significantly aids in evoking detailed recollections from early years. This perceptual illusion reinforces the bond between how we sense our physical selves and the recall of personal life stories. The results indicate that accessing memories involves more than just cognitive processes; it is profoundly intertwined with our bodily awareness. These revelations hold promise for developing innovative aids to restore lost memories or address conditions involving memory deficits.
Understanding the Enfacement Illusion and Its Impact
A groundbreaking study reveals that temporarily modifying individuals’ visual perception of their own bodies enhances the retrieval of personal memories, even those from early childhood periods.
Featured in Scientific Reports, a publication under the Nature journal family, this investigation marks the pioneering demonstration that grown adults can more readily summon early-life memories following a short exposure to a youthful rendition of their own facial features.
Experiment Details: The Enfacement Illusion Method
Neuroscientists from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge spearheaded the research with 50 adult participants. They employed the enfacement illusion, a method inducing the feeling that a face displayed on a screen belongs to the viewer themselves.
Participants observed a real-time video feed of their face, which was digitally altered using a filter to mimic their childhood appearance. The on-screen image synchronized with their head movements, fostering the belief that this child version was their actual reflection. In contrast, a control group underwent identical procedures but saw their unchanged adult faces.
Post-illusion, subjects engaged in an autobiographical memory task targeting memories from early childhood and the recent past year.
Results: Enhanced Detail in Childhood Recollections
The team evaluated the richness of details in participants’ episodic autobiographical memories—those enabling mental re-experiencing of past events, akin to time travel in the mind.
Key outcomes showed that individuals exposed to their younger selves recalled far more intricate childhood episodes compared to the control group viewing adult faces. This constitutes initial proof that minor shifts in self-body perception can profoundly affect access to remote memories.
Implications for Brain-Body Memory Links
The researchers posit that this breakthrough illuminates the interplay between body perception and memory formation. It paves the way for novel strategies to tap into elusive memories, potentially including those obscured by childhood amnesia—the common inability to remember the first few years of life.
Lead researcher Dr. Utkarsh Gupta, who performed this work during his PhD at Anglia Ruskin University and now holds a Cognitive Neuroscience Research Fellow position at the University of North Dakota, stated: All recalled events encompass not only external occurrences but also our constant bodily experiences.
We found that brief alterations to the bodily self, particularly embodying a childlike facial version, markedly improves retrieval of childhood memories. This likely occurs because the brain integrates bodily details into event encoding. Reactivating comparable bodily signals can facilitate memory recovery, even after many years.
Expert Insights on Revisiting the Past
Senior author Professor Jane Aspell, director of the Self & Body Lab at Anglia Ruskin University, elaborated: During the formation of our childhood memories, our bodies were different. We hypothesized that re-experiencing elements of that earlier body might enable better recall from that era.
Our data confirm a connection between the bodily self and autobiographical memory, where transient bodily modifications can ease access to far-off personal histories.
These developments are thrilling and point toward advanced body illusions for unlocking memories across life phases—possibly extending to infancy. In time, such techniques might evolve into therapeutic interventions supporting memory recovery in those with impairments.
