Last year, Henry Chung, PhD, a Lecturer at the School of Sport, Rehabilitation, and Exercise Sciences at the University of Essex, sat in front of his laptop as a participant in a rather peculiar experiment. The premise, as Chung understood it, was rather straightforward—look at a digitally de-aged version of your own face and see if it helps you remember things from childhood. “How does enhancing my appearance trigger memories?” said Chung. “Surely this won’t work.”

It did.

The experiment surfaced memories he was certain he had forgotten entirely.

What Chung experienced was more than just a simple illusion. Published in Scientific Reports, the study is the first to show that by looking at the childlike illusion of themselves in the mirror, adults can access memories from specific points in their lives. Scientists have long known that memory and our idea of “self” are interconnected. The more we recollect the autobiographical memories that define us, the more we deepen our relationship with ourselves. Philosopher John Locke argued as early as 1689, proposing that you are, quite literally, what you remember. But neither philosophers nor modern scientists have fully accounted for the role the body plays in our sense of self, until now.

The implications of this study, the research team says, extend beyond just memory recall.

Researchers have found that the brain’s sense of self is surprisingly easy to fool. From the classic rubber-hand illusion to full-body illusions in VR, deliberately feeding the brain mismatched sensory information can temporarily reshape who or what it thinks it inhabits. The enfacement illusion, which is what researchers used in this experiment, works on the same principle. Instead of the participants feeling a connection to a lost or fake body or its part, the researchers used a face filter to “trick” the participants into confronting their younger selves.

The study was led by Utkarsh Gupta, who was then completing his PhD at Anglia Ruskin University alongside Jane Aspell, PhD, head of the Self and Body Lab at the same university. “There hasn’t been much that has looked into this relation between what we call the bodily self, which is kind of foundational aspect of memory and of the self,” Aspell said. Fifty of the participants saw a live video of their own face. For half of them, including Chung, the face was digitally altered using a face filter, making them look like a child. As they moved their heads, the younger “mirror-alikes” moved their heads too—both in synchrony and then out of it. After the experiment, the participants were told to recall their childhood memories.

To confirm if the memories they were recalling were real or not, the team used a standardized testing protocol focused on recalling episodic memories. ”For episodic memory, the context is always part of the memory,” Aspell said. According to Gupta, all participants were exposed to similar questions, so even if participants were fabricating false memories, it was all homogenous.

For Chung, the experience brought back memories he thought he had lost. “As the interview went deeper and deeper, it felt less like an illusion,” Chung said. “It brought me back to a holiday where I was in Hong Kong with my family [and] the specific memory I got from it was really hot and humid.” Chung saw himself as a young child standing beside his grandparents’ grave on a peak summer afternoon. He remembered reaching toward the marble and pulling his hand back as it was too hot to touch. “To be completely honest, I completely forgot that happened until [Gupta] asked me that question,” Chung said.

He wasn’t alone.

Participants who temporarily embodied their childlike face recollected significantly more episodic childhood memory details than those who viewed their unaltered adult face. This finding challenges something we’ve long taken for granted, that our memories live entirely in the mind and can be retrieved through thought alone. The body, it turns out, holds part of the key.

The researchers believe that further, more sophisticated body illusions could unlock memories from different stages of life. Aspell said that even the study’s crude filter, which makes faces look generically baby-like rather than personally accurate, was enough to produce significant results. A deepfake video built from an actual childhood photograph, she said, would be far more powerful.

It’s even feasible to replicate the experiment at home, Aspell said, using widely available technologies. “If you’ve got snapchat, the filter is still there.” She even demonstrated the experiment for a journalist by projecting her phone screen to a computer. Although she said that a deepfake video—built from an actual childhood photograph—would be far more powerful.

Virtual Reality-based interventions have shown promising results for memory recall and self-perception. For Alzheimer’s patients, at least one study shows that immersive environments enhance memory and overall cognition. In psychotherapy, VR is already being used to help patients confront and speak compassionately to a younger version of themselves, leading to a decrease in self-criticism. Lead researcher Gupta also points to reminiscence therapy, which is already used in dementia and senior care, as a natural foundation for what comes next.

“In cases of immobilizations with aging, when people can’t be up in nature, but in a VR, they can go there [and] explore the mountains,” Gupta said. “Lots of senior healthcare facilities are doing that right now.” The enfacement illusion, it turns out, is just the beginning.

As for Chung, the experiment left something behind that no questionnaire could measure. There was grief, briefly felt, when the filter switched off, and his adult face reappeared on screen. “I realized how old I actually look in comparison,” Chung said. “It made me think differently about the perspective of how the youthful days are gone now.” But that is not all he is willing to remember.

“It’s really nice to remember some of those things I’d actually forgotten about,” he said. “It changed my perception about moving forward.” A marble grave in Hong Kong, too hot to touch on a summer afternoon. A memory he had carried for decades without knowing it, until a crude filter virtually gave him back the face he’d worn when he first lived it.

This experiment may have opened doors to understanding how much of our life is encoded not just in our mind, but in the body that carries us. And that, with the right reflection, even briefly, we might find our way back to an earlier time.