posted April 08, 2007 12:00 AM         

quote:

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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.

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posted April 08, 2007 03:58 AM         

1. Those who have been haunted by problems and have found standard psychology to have failed to help them. Natch, these people are likely to be depressed, and may also experience other memory problems due to stress, drugs (prescribed and otherwise), probably bad habits, etc.

2. People who need to believe out of ego, that is, they are some great "old soul" or even the reincarnation of some (at least in their opinion) Great Figure. There are con-artists out there that will happily sell them their confirmation, and these people will simply not patronize any hypnotist that refuses to play along with their ego games. These types, I'd imagine, would have the same likelihood of problems as the 1st group of people. (I'd also think they'd be much more likely to answer any ad to talk about themselves, too!)

3. Certain people who have faced tragedy and don't want to believe that a lost opportunity is lost for all time, or even that there might come a time that they will never walk on a beautiful beach again (as one told me this), could lead them to seek out the same type as the ego-driven type. This again strikes me as likely to produce depression and a prone to using drugs or bad habits that also adversely affect memory.

NOTE: I'm NOT saying that everyone who has recalled memories under hypnosis are fools, and I repeat that I'm not lumping all who believe or even used hypnosis to recall previous lives into 3 categories. In fact, even with the 3 groups above, it's entirely possible that their past life memories are real (though being real, the hypnotist may be a con-artist who doesn't even believe in it--I find life is RICH with irony!). My point is that the problems they found may be explained by other factors that led them to finding memories of previous lives via hypnosis to begin with are coincidentally the same factors that make them test the way they do in these tests. That is, it's not some mental defect that makes them believe in reincarnation, but some problem that led them to try to uncover the source of their pain or to deal with their life in this way (in addition to many other ways they could've dealt with it) are to coincidentally account for the results.

I'm also curious where they got their group of those who didn't believe to contrast them with. If they got them from a university, a group that can be expected to have sharp memorization skills, that could also throw things off.

In addition, plenty of people have past life memories without the benefit of hypnosis. And as for "false memory," I looked into that a few years ago and I found that the vast majority of "false memory syndrome" were done with administered drugs IN ADDITION TO the hypnosis, at least to the point that they solidly believed enough to get the law involved (and even then it took time for a trained doctor or therapist to brainwash the victim enough to believe it). That is, this wasn't some new age hocus pocus, these false memories were generally created by professional doctors that knew how to twist their victim's memories in order to exploit their victim for the greed of the therapist (there was years of cashing in as a result, and suing the family helped pay the bills) and/or for some ideological cause (and there was more than one ideological faction exploiting this). That is to say, the standard way many new agers hypnotize clients (even con-artists) are different from how professional psychiatrists and the like got their victims to accept false memories.

My own views--musings, more like it (dang Libran indecisiveness!)--are too complicated to share and, IMO, irrelevent beyond that I'm agnostic on this. The point of my posting here isn't to promote or deny reincarnation and the memories of other lives, but to point out that the results of this study seem pretty predictable to me, and given everything, it doesn't really do anything to "debunk" past life memories itself. That the "connection" they speak of is coincidental rather than actual.

posted April 08, 2007 06:15 AM         

BTW: when these so called scientists can never even figure out a single brain cell, all these are merely hypothesis. Eventually one day they come up with another story, another theory that disproves everything they have ever believed.

I am not saying everything that are held as beliefs are true, but if we take time to analyze and explain certain things to ourself, we will get the right answer - so long we are wise enough to ask the right questions, that is.

@ Lotus, don't get yourself stressed out for no reason. different people have different belief's but then there is an absolute truth as well. Everyone stands on different levels of knowledge.