People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study.

The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to implausible reincarnation claims in the first place.

Researchers recruited people who, after undergoing hypnotic therapy, had come to believe that they had past lives.

Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of names: non-famous names they had already seen (from the earlier list), famous names, and names of non-famous people that they had not previously seen. Their task was to identify which names were famous.

The researchers found that, compared to control subjects who dismissed the idea of reincarnation, past-life believers were almost twice as likely to misidentify names. In particular, their tendency was to wrongly identify as famous the non-famous names they had seen in the first task. This kind of error, called a source-monitoring error, indicates that a person has difficulty recognizing where a memory came from.

Power of suggestion

People who are likely to make these kinds of errors might end up convincing themselves of things that aren’t true, said lead researcher Maarten Peters of Maastricht University in The Netherlands. When people who are prone to making these mistakes undergo hypnosis and are repeatedly asked to talk about a potential idea—like a past life—they might, as they grow more familiar with it, eventually convert the idea into a full-blown false memory.

This is because they can’t distinguish between things that have really happened and things that have been suggested to them, Peters told LiveScience.

Past life memories are not the only type of implausible memories that have been studied in this manner. Richard McNally, a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, has found that self-proclaimed alien abductees are also twice as likely to commit source monitoring errors.

Creative minds

As for what might make people more prone to committing such errors to begin with, McNally says that it could be the byproduct of especially vivid imagery skills. He has found that people who commonly make source-monitoring errors respond to and imagine experiences more strongly than the average person, and they also tend to be more creative.

“It might be harder to discriminate between a vivid image that you’d generated yourself and the memory of a perception of something you actually saw,” he said in a telephone interview.

Peters also found in his study, detailed in the March issue of Consciousness and Cognition, that people with implausible memories are also more likely to be depressed and to experience sleep problems, and this could also make them more prone to memory mistakes.

And once people make this kind of mistake, they might be inclined to stick to their guns for spiritual reasons, McNally said. “It may be a variant expression of certain religious impulses,” he said. “We suspect that this might be kind of a psychological buffering mechanism against the fear of death.”

Source

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It makes a lot of sense, though what about stories of little kids urging their parents to take them somewhere, that the kids would otherwise not even knew existed.

I really think it depends on what people believe reincarnation really is. I have met a lot of people who claimed to be Cleopatra in a past life and I must admit, I always wondered if she had multiple personality disorder. And why is it that it's usually someone famous?
Anyhow, kidding aside, I also wonder about the children who are aware of someone elses life, as you pointed out.

that's a good point because i've heard many people say they were the same person in a past life... when 10,000 people claim to have been the same person... you sort of start to become very skeptical of the whole idea...



well... we have thest two things... t.v. and school... and unless someone is willing to keep children away from those two things... we'll never know for sure how much influence either of those things have...

While I don't totally discount the possiblity of reincarnation (heck, even the ancient Jews believed in it), I do find it ludicrous that everyone claiming past lives were someone famous. Just once I would like to meet Khmanhkptah instead of Thutmoses III, Mimi Du Bois instead of Jean D'Arc, John Jones instead of Abraham Lincoln!

Now, in the work that I'm currently training to do... we had touched apon "phantom" pain.

Part of this theory is that some unexplained pain in a person's body could be risidual pain from a past life.

For example, say someone's neck hurts. A pain that starts from the back of the neck and radiats to the front. They've had this pain suddenly and there's no medical clue as to what made it happen. Somepeople will combined past life regression with massage therapy to try and find out why the pain is there... then work it out with massage techniques.

So, the therapist or practitioner will first do a past life regression on the client. And what they find out is that the person in a previous life had been beheaded. After finding that out, they then try to dig a bit deeper to find out why this residual pain from the beheading manifested in this life. Say.. there was a certain scent that was present when the person't death occured, and then in this life the person experienced that scent again. So once that's found out, the massage therapy can be applied to help remove that pain from the person's neck. Now, it probaly won't take just one session... pain is a tricky thing. Hells, I still have a pain in my back that's been there for 10 years... It doesn't go away that easily. Especialy if it's deep seeded in your muscles.

And the thing about Muscles is, they also hold memories. We could be working on a client, doing maybe deep tissue on their back.. and theywould suddenly start crying. Not because we're hurting them. (we do make sure the pressure is just right) But because while we were releasing the tention in their muscles, a deep seeded emotion and memory could have been released. So it would stand to reason that some people could carry a pain from a previous life over.


As for the famous people thing.. Yeah.. alot of people fall for that "I was Joan of Arc!" Kind of crap. You just have to find someone who actually knows what they're doing. And that's not really easy to do with the amount of frauds out there. It took getting into Massage Therapy to find the credible therapies as well as past life regression to help with healing pains.