If you’re driving home for Christmas (insert Chris Rea earworm here) – and by that I mean the old family home – you’re likely to be experiencing a familiar mix of excited anticipation and faint dread of being trapped in close quarters with relatives. There’s nothing like Christmas for mental time travel triggered by family traditions and well-worn arguments.

You might also have the sort of family, like mine, which often insists on perceiving and treating you as you were 40-plus years ago. Although I’m closer than I’d like to 50, my father still voices concerns about me crossing roads, “wrapping up warm” and leaving electric plugs switched on. I will forever be his little girl.

Since our identity is in part created by how those around us see us and behave towards us, the festive season can temporarily cause us to regress to a past, childish version of our self – and this isn’t always welcome. But I’d like to suggest there is a silver lining of opportunity here though: the chance to gain access to forgotten memories.

As a professor of cognitive neuroscience, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to test this idea with colleagues in my lab. In particular, we wanted to scientifically investigate whether people can recall more detailed childhood memories if they can “reinhabit” the body they had as a child.

I think it makes intuitive........

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