Want To “Time Travel” Back To Your Childhood? Baby Filter Image Illusion Could Unlock Lost Memories

Would you like to travel back in time? You may not need a flux capacitor or Tardis to unlock memories from your past, according to the neuroscientists behind a new study, who found that a little bit of image trickery could be enough to retrieve long-buried childhood memories.

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The team at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK, recruited 50 healthy adults to experience what’s called an “enfacement illusion”. They were asked to view a live video of themselves on a computer screen; but for half of the participants, the image was filtered to resemble what they might have looked like as a child.

Emphasis on the might – honestly, it’s all a little bit uncanny valley.

The video was mirrored, so as the participants moved their faces, the face on screen responded to give them the impression they were seeing themselves in the mirror. This helped create the illusion that the altered face was their own.

After viewing this eldritch Zoom call – or, for the lucky control participants, an unfiltered video – the groups completed autobiographical memory interviews in which they were asked to recall childhood memories as well as more recent ones.

“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,” said lead author Dr Utkarsh Gupta in a statement.

“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,” Gupta added.

The participants who viewed the childlike faces were able to remember significantly more childhood memories. Building on this, the researchers believe it could be possible to develop recall techniques that can get around “childhood amnesia” – the phase that typically ends around age 3 and is the reason we can’t remember life as a baby.  

“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?” said senior author Professor Jane Aspell.

“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.”

We’re not necessarily saying the average person could learn an awful lot from their memories of babyhood – human babies are famously quite ineffectual, though it would be cool to recollect how it felt to have 100 more bones than you do now.

But the study does open up some intriguing possibilities when it comes to aiding recall in people who develop memory impairments later in life, as the authors suggest the illusion may be adapted to help.

“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,” said Aspell.  

The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.