AVAILABLE NOW: TICKETS FOR TIME TRAVEL

 This week sees the publication of an amazing new discovery…

This week, my son and I joined the millions who flocked to the golf course (or in our case, the driving range) inspired by the exploits of McIlroy et al. during the US Masters.  It had been many months since either of us had picked up a club in anger, so I deliberately arranged the most remote bay available.  The last thing I wanted was an audience as my wedge inevitably missed the ball entirely, dribbled it across the mat, or sent it careening into the Perspex partition. And besides, I knew this stage wouldn’t last. Bit by bit, and miss-hit by miss-hit, I remembered the various pieces of the jig-saw (grip, club-face, wrists, arms, feet, legs …head) that had to come together to make my swing, well, swing. I knew the correct way to address that ball. I’d had all the elements in the process drilled into me, over hundreds of hours, by an incredibly patient school-friend and my father before him. It just took a lot of embarrassing run-throughs before I could recollect them all, in order, and sufficiently long enough to make the process (almost/sometimes/occasionally) automatic.

So I was intrigued to read an article in this week’s Nature newsletter entitled: “A face-swapping illusion can unlock childhood memories,”* in which fifty adults were essentially ‘tricked’ into identifying with a younger image of themselves, in a similar way to the famous ‘rubber hand illusion,’ by presenting them with ‘a real-time video display of their own face on a screen… Half of our participants saw their face in a totally unaltered way. But the other half, thanks to an image filter, saw a younger, childlike version of themselves.’

The subjects were then asked to complete a questionnaire or “autobiographical memory interview” and the difference between the altered image group and the control group was striking:

‘We found that people recalled significantly more details of childhood memories after viewing a younger face than they did after viewing their unaltered appearance. Participants retrieved richer, more vivid details, including recollections of specific places, emotions and sensory perceptions. This effect was specifically found for childhood memories and not for recent ones, suggesting the illusion taps into a deep connection between body representations and memories anchored in the past.’

But this doorway to our past, our own personal Tardis, is much bigger on the inside than it appears.  Not so much Dr. Who, as ‘who we see ourselves as,’  as the introduction to one seminal paper on Autobiographical Memory suggests:**

‘THE SELF AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

Our knowledge of self is very much tied up with the “story” of how what we have experienced has made us who we are, and how who we are has led us to do what we have done. Autobiographical self-knowledge, in turn, requires a capacity to represent the self as a psychologically coherent entity persisting through time, whose past experiences are remembered as belonging to its present self. Episodic memory serves this function by enabling its owner to mentally travel back in time to relive personally experienced events. Absenting this ability, a person would be unable to represent past and present states as aspects of the same personal identity, and thus be unable to know that a current mental state represents an episode or state previously experienced. To experience memory as autobiographical self-knowledge requires, at a minimum, three capabilities:

 1)     A capacity for self-reflection; that is, the ability to reflect on my own mental states – to know about my own knowing.

2)     A sense of personal agency personal ownership; that is, the belief that I am the cause of my thoughts and actions and the feeling that my thoughts and acts belong to me.

3)     The ability to think about time as an unfolding of personal happenings centered about the self.’

Equipped with the above, we can effectively use memory to create a narrative to support where we are, in the present, and/or where we’re heading next (either where we want to be heading or fear  we’ll be heading).  As professionals ploughing our respective furrows in The Business of Pleasure, we know that each narrative pivots on major turning points in the plot or character development (the first generally bringing about the second) and as with stage and screen, so to with Autobiographical Memory, as another major work on the subject points out: ***

‘In an intriguing study Pillemer, Picariello, Law and Reichmann investigated memory for specific educational episodes. The initial impetus for this work was the observation that autobiographies often contain accounts of highly specific events that were “turning points” (self-defining moments) for the individual and that usually involved the adoption of a superordinate life goal and then determined much of the individual’s later activities. Pillemer et al. (1996) found that students and alumnae were frequently able to report, in detail, highly vivid memories of interactions with professors and other teachers who profoundly influenced their academic interests and sometimes the whole of their life. These were often events in which superordinate long-term goals were adopted by the individual, for example to become a chemist, a writer, and so on.’ 

For ‘superordinate long-term goals' read ‘I want’ songs in musical theatre.  And whether you Just Can’t Wait To Be King, are eagerly awaiting an encounter like The Wizard and I or simply want My Shot (no golf pun intended) my guess is that you’ll probably supercharge your Autobiographic Memory far more in the middle of the stalls, surrounded by a thousand or two similarly engaged time-travellers, than staring at your twelve-year-old acne-augmented kisser on a screen.

DT 17 April 2026

*article by Jane Aspell & Utkarsh Gupta, edited by Daisy Yuhas

** ‘A THEORY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY: NECESSARY COMPONENTS AND DISORDERS RESULTING FROM THEIR LOSS’  Stanley B. Klein, Tim P. German, Leda Cosmides and Rami Gabriel, Social Cognition, Vol 22, 2004.

***The Construction of Autobiographical Memories in the Self-Memory System Martin A Conway, Christopher W. Pleydell-Pearce Psychological Review, May 2000