Scientific reason for reincarnation beliefs?

[Janus]

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.”

Belief in reincarnation tied to memory errors (http://www.livescience.com/othernews/070406_past_lives.html)

[Kwisatz Haderach]

Did they control for sample bias? In other words, how exactly did they select the subjects for the experimental group and the control group, and how exactly did they determine who had beliefs about reincarnation, anyway?

For the results to be valid, they would have needed to take a random sample of people among believers and non-believers over a wide geographic area. I sincerely doubt they used a random sample.

[Janus]

Did they control for sample bias?
I would think that would be assumed for any accredited scientific study.

[Kropotkin Has a Posse]

Note how it's always a famous person.

[Vargha Poralli]

To my knowledge those claims have some underlying reasons for it. They are all fraudry.

Once a girl claimed that she was a Cobra in her previous birth and she was seperated by her mate by certain family in the last birth. Her mate was born in to that family and if they don't marry her to him the whole family will suffer terrible consequences.So the boy's family married him to her out of fear.

In reality the boy and the girl had already loved each other but since they can't marry by convincing their parents as they are of different castes. So they scammed their whole superstitious family.This Incidence happened in Uttar Pradesh India some 7-8 years back. And some investigative journals come up with type of scams at least once in 2 months.

************************************************** *******

In fact this reincarnation thing is explained in different ways in different sects of Hindusim.

But the core concept is that Atman(soul or life) is immortal,while the body is mortal. The soul resides inside the body as long the body can support it and when the body no longer can support it just leaves it and enters another form.You all might be aware with the concept of Karma.This concept acts as a guide to decide one's next reincarnation.

[manic expression]

Religions, belief systems and people who hold reincarnation as true are generally suspicious of people who claim to be x or y in a past life. I know that Hindu thought posits that it is very difficult, if not impossible for people who don't meditate all day, to remember a past life.

[ichneumon]

fyi, i think reincarnation is BS. but still, there are investigations...


Does the Socio-Psychological Hypothesis Explain Cases of the Reincarnation Type?
[Brief Reports]

Schouten, Sybo A. Ph.D.1; Stevenson, Ian M.D.2
1Psychology Laboratory, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
2Division of Personality Studies, Box 152 HSC, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22908. Send reprint requests to Dr. Stevenson.
The investigation and analysis of the cases reported here have been supported by the Nagamasa Azuma Fund, The Lifebridge Foundation, the Bernstein Brothers Foundation, Richard Adams, and one anonymous donor. Thanks are due to Erlendur Haraldsson and Satwant Pasricha for contributing cases included in the analysis or participating in their investigation. Emily Cook and Dawn Hunt offered helpful comments for the improvement of this report.

Since the 1960s, one of us (IS) and his collaborators have systematically collected and investigated hundreds of experiences of children who claim to recall events of a previous life as another person (Stevenson, 1974, 1975, 1997). It appears that these experiences, called "cases of the reincarnation type" (often shortened to "CORT"), show a number of recurrent characteristics (Cook et al., 1983) and that these characteristics remain rather stable over time (Pasricha and Stevenson, 1987). Hence, the occurrence of CORT can be considered as a distinguishable and established phenomenon.

CORT are most readily found in cultures in which the belief in reincarnation is taken for granted by many. (Instances also occur, less frequently, in other parts of the world.) Although the persons involved in CORT usually consider the experience as an instance of reincarnation, it is plausible to think that the nature and the reports of these cases are influenced, or perhaps can be entirely explained, by psychological and cultural processes. Examples of hypotheses based on such processes are the "socio-psychological" hypothesis (Brody, 1979; Chari, 1962, 1987; Stevenson and Samararatne 1988) and the "construction of an alternate personality" hypothesis of Mills (1989).

Stevenson and Samararatne (1988, p. 237) have expressed the explanation based on the "socio-psychological" hypothesis as follows: In a culture having a belief in reincarnation a child who seems to speak about a previous life will be encouraged to say more. What he says then leads his parents somehow to find another family whose members come to believe that the child has been speaking about a deceased member of their family. The two families exchange information about details, and they end by crediting the subject with having had much more knowledge about the identified deceased person than he really had had.

Because this explanation rests on established socio-psychological processes, it offers one of the best explanations for CORT in terms of known and nonparanormal processes. The present study was aimed at finding evidence for the validity of this explanation.

The socio-psychological hypothesis of cases of the reincarnation type suggests that a child's parents may elaborate, through questioning, guidance, and later modification, statements their child made about a deceased person. When no one made a written record of the child's statements before they were verified, the parents may thus believe that he or she made more, and more correct, statements than he or she did. One would expect that there would be fewer statements and fewer correct ones in the cases with written records made before verification (B cases) than in those with written records made afterward (A cases). To test this hypothesis, we compared a group of B cases and a group of A cases from India and Sri Lanka.

B cases are relatively rare and mainly from India and Sri Lanka. Examples of B cases may be found in Stevenson (1975), Stevenson and Samararatne (1988), Haraldsson (1991), and Mills et al. (1994). This type of case is rare because, if the child gives enough specifying detail about the claimed previous life and if the distances involved are not great, the parents will usually try to verify for themselves his or her statements. They rarely make a written record of what the child has said before they do this. Investigators thus learn of most of these cases only after the families concerned have met and mingled their memories of what the child said and what was correct for the presumed deceased person to whose life the child seemed to refer.

Methods

Predictions: The socio-psychological hypothesis assumes that after the families meet the interactions will have three effects. First, wrong statements might be given a new interpretation to make them fit with new information obtained about the assumed previous personality. Second, statements by the child initially not attributed as being related to the previous personality might be interpreted to fit details learned about that person and subsequently added to the set of statements, which the child is supposed to have made about his or her previous life. Third, after the families meet, informants may attribute to the child statements that he or she made only after learning the information normally. Hence, based on the socio-psychological hypothesis, one would expect a lower percentage of correct statements in cases in which the statements were recorded before the families met (the "before" or B cases) than in cases in which statements were recorded after the families had met (the "after" or A cases). In addition, one would expect the total number of statements-correct, incorrect, and unverified-to be, on average, higher for the A cases than for the B cases.

Selection of Cases: All thoroughly investigated cases of India and Sri Lanka, for which the number of correct and incorrect statements had been counted and recorded, were chosen. This yielded 9 B cases and 57 A cases from India and 12 B cases and 25 A cases from Sri Lanka, for a total of 21 B cases and 82 A cases.

Statistics: The two groups were compared using Student's t-tests.

Results

Although the cultures of (mainly Hindu) India and (mainly Buddhist) Sri Lanka have important differences, we believe they are sufficiently similar to warrant our making, initially, an analysis of the cases of the two countries combined. The mean percentage of correct statements is 76.7% for the B cases and 78.4% for the A cases. Nevertheless, because culture might have an effect on the percentage of correct statements, the analysis was repeated for the two countries separately. For India, the percentage of correct statements is 80.7% (N = 9; SD = 12.9, median = 80) for the B cases and 80.3% (N = 57, SD = 16.8, median = 83.5) for the A cases. For Sri Lanka, these values are 73.8% (N = 12, SD = 17.8, median = 77) and 74.2% (N = 25, SD = 24.8, median = 84.5), respectively.

The average number of all statements turned out to be 18.5 for the A cases (SD = 12.0, median = 15) and 25.5 for the B cases (SD = 9.9, median = 24.5), a significant difference (t = 2.44, df = 101, p < .01). This difference is observed in cases from India and Sri Lanka separately but reaches significance only for the cases from India.

We considered the possibility that if the families involved in the A cases had some knowledge of each other, however slight, before the case developed, the child, or parents, might have used whatever normal knowledge they had to augment the number of correct statements attributed to the child. We therefore made a separate analysis to examine such contamination. For 79 of the 82 A cases, we had information about prior knowledge (or its absence) on the part of the subject&#39;s family about the family of the concerned deceased person. We found that when the subject&#39;s family had such prior knowledge (N = 35), the mean number of the subject&#39;s statements was 21.0 (SD = 14.9, median = 16); the mean percentage of correct statements for this subgroup was 76.1 (SD = 19.5, median = 83). When the subject&#39;s family had no prior knowledge of the other family (N = 24), the mean number of the subject&#39;s statements was 16.6 (SD = 8.7, median = 14); the percentage of correct statements for this group was 78.9 (SD = 20.4, median = 85). These differences were not significant. Although the subgroup with some prior knowledge of the other family had a slightly higher total number of statements, the percentage of correct statements in this subgroup was lower than in the group in which the subject&#39;s family had no prior knowledge of the other family.

Discussion

Contrary to expectation, B and A cases of India and Sri Lanka all yielded approximately equal percentages of correct statements and the average overall number of statements was lower for the A cases. These findings suggest that the socio-psychological process of "creating" more, and more correct, statements after the families meet does not take place or at least does not influence the data to a measurable degree. The very fact that B cases exist indicates that a meeting between families is not a necessary condition for the occurrence of CORT. Because the data appear not to confirm the essential predictions derived from the socio-psychological hypothesis, this hypothesis seems unable to explain CORT.

Conclusion

No evidence was obtained to support the hypothesis that socio-psychological circumstances promote a false elaboration of apparent memories of previous lives.

[El Chavo]

In Plato&#39;s Phaedo Socrates argues for the continuity of life after death. He gives a view of reincarnation.

[Fidelbrand]

Very interesting article Janus, thanks.