A Youthful Illusion Sharpens Memory

By making people feel as if their face is a younger version of itself, researchers can bring childhood memories into sharper focus

- BY JANE ASPELL AND UTKARSH GUPTA

ONE OF THE FRUSTRATIONS of getting older is that some early memories seem to dim and fade with time.

The details of cherished, sun-drenched childhood days spent at the seaside seem to dissolve away like sea-foam on the beach as the years pass. Might there be a way to recover them?

Scientists call these recollections of distinct events and experiences from our own lives “autobiographical episodic memory.” They enable us to mentally time travel to the events of our past, allowing us to experience sensory details of things that we’ve seen, heard, tasted, touched and smelled, as well as the emotions we felt at those times. But what of the body we used to inhabit? In every past (and present) moment, our brain received a rich, continuous set of multisensory signals from our body—including those tied to bodily states. Our memories of the past should encode the type of body we had at different ages, when different memories were laid down—although there has been surprisingly little research on this idea so far.

As neuroscientists, we wondered whether we could use this brain-body connection to jog long-lost memories—by getting people “back inside” the bodies they had at younger ages. In a unique experiment, we found that temporarily changing one’s perceived body affects access to memories from specific periods in life. We showed that a subtle illusion in which participants viewed a childlike version of their own face that moved in synchrony with them, as a mirror reflection does, could enhance their recollection of early memories.