A paper published this week in the journal Nature: Scientific Reports provided some interesting insights into how our memories of our own past might work -- but also raised a couple of troubling questions in my mind.
It's called "Illusory Ownership of One's Younger Face Facilitates Access to Childhood Episodic Autobiographical Memories," and was the work of Utkarsh Gupta, Peter Bright, Alex Clarke, Waheeb Zafar, Pilar Recarte-Perez and Jane E. Aspell, of Anglia Ruskin University. Here's their description of what they did:
Our autobiographical memories reflect our personal experiences at specific times in our lives. All life events are experienced while we inhabit our body, raising the question of whether a representation of our bodily self is inherent in our memories. Here we explored this possibility by investigating if the retrieval of childhood autobiographical memories would be influenced by a body illusion that gives participants the experience of ownership for a ‘child version’ of their own face. Fifty neurologically healthy adults were tested in an online enfacement illusion study. Feelings of ownership and agency for the face were greater during conditions with visuo-motor synchrony than asynchronous conditions. Critically, participants who enfaced (embodied) their child-like face recollected more childhood episodic memory details than those who enfaced their adult face. No effects on autobiographical semantic memory recollection were found. This finding indicates that there is an interaction between the bodily self and autobiographical memory, showing that temporary changes to the representation and experience of the bodily self impacts access to memory.
Which is fascinating. Given the sensation of inhabiting our own (younger) body, we seem to unlock stored memories we previously could not access. It makes me wonder what's up there in our memory centers, you know? Assuming your brain is physiologically normal and uninjured, do you really have a record of everything that's happened to you in there somewhere, just waiting for the right trigger to release it?
"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 study senior author Jane Aspell, in an interview with Science Daily. "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."Here's the thing, though.
How do they know the memories these volunteers reported are real?
[Image is in the Public Domain]
Let me give you an example from my own childhood.
When I was about four, my parents and I moved from a house in South Charleston, West Virginia to one in nearby Saint Albans. My dad worked at the Marine Corps Recruiting and Training Station at the time, and the move was basically to a nicer neighborhood. We'd lived in a rental next door to a big house I remember as "the green house" -- it was a blocky rectangular thing, two story, painted light green, where a family with two older boys (at a guess, perhaps seven and nine) lived.
Well, on moving day, my parents were loading the last stuff in the car, and had told me to entertain myself for a half-hour or so while they were finishing up. I wandered into the yard in front of the green house, and the two boys who lived there asked me if I wanted to play. I said "sure," and we went inside, then upstairs -- where they thought it'd be funny to trap me, and convince me my parents were going to leave without me.
I looked down from the window, screaming and trying to alert my mother, but she didn't hear me. I was terrified of being left behind (not, realistically, that this would ever have happened). Eventually the two boys relented and let me go, and I rejoined my parents -- me still tearful and freaking out about my near miss, they wondering what the hell had upset me.
Here's the kicker, though: I have no idea if this actually happened.
I asked my mother about it some years later, and she had no memory of it -- she didn't recall my disappearing, even for a short time, on the day we moved, nor returning upset and scared. "Why would I have told you to run off and play when we were about to leave?" she asked, which I had to admit was a good question. I have zero other memories of the two boys next door (other than that they existed), and to my knowledge I never went inside their house, nor was invited by them to play, on any other occasion. I've always been prone to vivid dreams; I remember being somewhat older, perhaps eight or nine, and having flying dreams so realistic that upon awakening I was halfway convinced they'd really happened. I might be recalling an unusually detailed (and terrifying) dream; or maybe there were two neighbor boys who thought it'd be funny to scare the living shit out of a gullible little kid.
The problem is, there's no way to tell which is the truth.
So I have no doubt that the Gupta et al. study triggered the release of something in the minds of the volunteers, but I think it's a stretch to conclude that what they accessed were real and accurate memories. I've seen plenty of evidence -- both from scientific studies and the experiences of me and my friends -- indicating that our memories are plastic, malleable, easily warped, and inaccurate. We all too readily conflate our recollections of what actually happened with (1) what we think happened, (2) what we were told happened, and (3) outright mental fabrications. A famous -- if unsettling -- study from Portsmouth University in 2008 looked at people's memories of the 2005 terrorist bombing of a double-decker bus in London, and found that many people recalled intricate and vivid detail from CCTV footage of the explosion, and made statements like, "The bus had just stopped to let people off when two women and a man got on" and "He placed a bag by his side, the woman sat down and as the bus left, there was an explosion" and "There was a severed leg on the floor" and "The bus had stopped at a traffic light when there was a bright light, a loud bang and the top flew off."
The problem? There is no CCTV footage of the explosion. None. Presented with that fact, people were astonished. That couldn't be true, they said; they knew they'd seen it, they could still picture it, still recall how upset they'd been watching it. One person, told that no video of the event existed, accused the researchers of lying.
So there you have it. Another reason not to trust your own recollections of past events, and a caution not to get your hopes up about accessing them by visualizing yourself as a child. Me, I'd just as soon not remember a lot of that stuff. Even if I was never kidnapped by the neighbors when I was four, I didn't exactly have a happy childhood. I'd just as soon remain in the present, thank you very much.
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