Looking at your younger self can enhance childhood memories

By Guusje Boselie 

How much do you remember from your childhood? Researchers at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge may have found a way to bring back details from the past. In their recently published article, they explained that just looking at your face as your younger self can enhance your memories from the past. 

It is a question that is asked very often: what is the first memory you have? For some people, these memories start around the age of two, while others barely have any memories under the age of 10. Although our childhood experiences play an important role in shaping us, almost no one remembers every little detail from this time in their life. 

What makes us remember? 

Researchers now might have found a way to help you remember the little details from the past. For this research, they were wondering whether the representation of how our body looks, our bodily self-consciousness, is a part of the memories we make at different parts of our lives. This would mean that when you memorise an event from the past, you re-experience not only that memory, but also how your body looked at the time of the event. If this is the case, seeing your younger body could also help you retrieve old memories. To investigate this, the researchers at Anglia Ruskin University studied memory retrieval when they morphed the body image. 

Seeing your child-like face enhances memories

In this study, 50 participants had to recollect autobiographic memories from events until the age of 11 and recent events, while either viewing the reflection of their own face or their face morphed like that of a child. Researchers called this the visuomotor enfacement illusion. For half of the participants, the face they saw moved synchronously with their own, and for the other half, it moved asynchronously. The researchers found that the people seeing their child-like face remembered more episodic memory details, which are memories of personal experiences, than those seeing their own face. No effect on semantic memory, which is the memory of facts, and on recent memories was found. 

However, the researchers also found no differences between the synchronous and asynchronous conditions. This could indicate that simply seeing a picture from childhood that doesn’t move along with your face is enough to bring back memory details from the past. So maybe your bodily self-consciousness, experiencing your younger body, isn’t the magic answer to get back your earliest memories. It could be just as simple as opening an old photo album. 

Baby filter 

While the reason behind the effect hasn’t been fully proven yet, one thing is clear: looking at your younger self will enhance your childhood memories. So, for a look in the fountain of youth, you should get that baby filter out on your phone. It might be enough to open a whole new side of yourself that you never knew you had.