Malfunction memory creates memories of past lives

The mysterious story about people who believe they were an Indian princess or a reborn officer in this life is more likely to be a product of a deviant form of memory, recent research says.

Perhaps before, it was the tendency to create this false memory that led people to revisit the explanation of past lives. Researchers looked at people who, after hypnotherapy, became convinced that they had a previous life.

These people were asked to read aloud a list of 40 anonymous names. After 2 hours of waiting, the scientists told them that they were going to read a list of 3 types of names: the anonymous people they had seen (in the previous list), famous names, and names of those who are not famous they have never read before. The experimenter needs to determine what is the famous name.

Researchers found that, compared to those who control (not believing in the idea of ​​past life), those who believe in rebirth have twice the wrong rate of name recognition. In particular, they tend to get the wrong names that were seen on the previous list into celebrities. This type of deviation proves that people have trouble recognizing where the memory comes from.

Such people are easy to deluded into the untrue, said lead researcher Maarten Peters from Maastricht University in the Netherlands. If they experience hypnosis and are constantly asked to talk about some subconscious idea - such as a previous life - they may become familiar with the idea and eventually turn it into a perfect mistake memory.

That's because they can't distinguish what was once experienced and stuff stuffed into the head, Peters said.

The memory of past life is not the only form of memory deviation studied in this work. Richard McNally, a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, found that people who claim to be abducted by extraterrestrials are more likely to be misled in memory.

T. An