So, this isn’t news, nor is it science, per se. But I wanted to share here because I was one of those kids from about 2 to 4. As mentioned in the story, it of course all faded thereafter, but I could talk at length about my life in Texas even though I had never been. My parents found it odd but not entirely outside expectations.
Consider me highly sceptical.
How Aija once dramatically declared to her parents, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the end of the world!” and curtsied.
“It’s a little disturbing to hear that from a 2-year-old, especially in the middle of a pandemic,” Marie says with a slight laugh.
Tucker nods. “You kind of wonder where she even picked up the expression.”
Because, yeah, there were absolutely no individuals on TV or radio who sarcastically remarked during the pandemic “ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the end of the world!” Just because the parents didn’t remember hearing it, doesn’t mean the child didn’t hear it and emulate it. Childrens’ brains are wired to pay attention to their surroundings in ways that adults aren’t, because that’s how they learn. It seems massively more likely that the children in these cases are echoing things they have heard and absorbed that their parents simply paid no attention to.
Unless the parents can categorically prove that, for example, they never watched a film or documentary about the Holocaust while their child was nearby and able to hear it, that seems a far more likely explanation than reincarnation. For that matter, I’d be more inclined to believe that the child was remembering details from a documentary the parents watched when the child was still a baby, and thus considered unable to absorb anything at all, than believe the child was remembering a past life.
The fact that they can never be pinned down to a specific historic individual is also suspect. The article gives a generic “Presumably there were a lot of Ninas in concentration camps”, but okay, has anyone checked how many there were, and what ages they were, and what other details might match up with the child’s story? A bit of research would prove it one way or another, and the reluctance to follow through on that research makes it hard for me to take the claims seriously.
Overall, me too. However, I do find it very interesting and there are a number of compelling stories out there.
There’s a YouTuber Kendall Rae who does a video about an individual on this topic, there’s also this channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4XCB1NgoJg that has a wide array. IIRC, this one is the one that seems the most famous example.
In many cases I think parents coax the kids. In other cases it could just be kids being weird, likely most of them. But… it does make you wonder, where does that weirdness come from?
where does that weirdness come from?
Kids are weird, largely because they repeat things they hear without any understanding of the meanings and significance behind the words. So in the cases of past lives, they’re repeating stuff they’ve heard on TV, films, documentaries, etc, and describing images they’ve seen on posters and adverts and book covers. And they talk about it like it’s real because at that age, kids can’t tell the difference between reality and fiction, so it’s all equally real and it all gets blended together in their minds. Then adults read something into it that isn’t really there.
Between confirmation bias, human pattern recognition even where there are none, under/in-development brains, higher fantasy and creativity in children, less separation and knowledge about inner and outer experience, and dreaming/dream-like hallucinations, I’m skeptical any of it to be true.
Every discovery and connection they make read like possible fallacies, misattributions, confirmation-bias.
The sheer mass of humans means random hallucinations will match adult knowledge and sometimes deceased people. 2.2k across the world, and a third of them without a deceased match doesn’t seem implausible to that.
a mechanism that might explain how a person could recall living a past life
For centuries Europe knew and experienced witchcraft and other demons. The U.S. experienced aliens and abductions - but only after they became popular in the media. The human race is great at hallucinating, even on a broad societal level and with confidence.
We can explain many misattributed traditions, hysteria, and other behaviors and hallucinations. We hallucinate more of what we heard of than if we hadn’t. I don’t see why we would find a past-life remembering more likely than faulty human nature. Which I guess requires some knowledge and awareness about human history and perception.
There have also been numerous cases of people lying for the hell of it or publicity. I’m certain some people make use of this theory / legend too.
I’m reminded of AI hallucinating facts, which seems like an interesting analogy. :P (In a more narrow and artificial, trained system. If it can happen there, why would it not in more complex systems/the human brain.)
The article was too long for me. I only read through the first two sections.
If LLM hallucinations increase with temperature… what will global warming do to humans!? 😂
I mean, Florida is a pretty good demonstration of what increased temperature does to a person. Looking forward to the rest of the world turning to Florida.
Appreciated your post very much. Thank you! In a society and Internet where rational thinking is extremely common, it is, at least for me, unusual to come across these kind of public posts. I can, to some extent, relate to the actual content and it does remind me of an old friend (RIP) who told me a memorable anecdote about his moments of clairvoyance. It also reminds me what I’ve read in several books : Children grow up and almost always parents tell them to shut up about their imaginary friends or the colors around persons they see. And that is actually not that very bad because in order to “survive” in society and to cope with all the impulses that our senses have to deal with it is useful to be able to filter some of the input. It should however imho not make the world even more rational than we need to.
I read the article and I’m, fairly, open minded about subjects such as this (as well as OBE, NDE, Remote Viewing, etc).
What do you think/feel about this subject in particular?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. More then likely kids love to play act and role play. It is one way they learn. Is it possible too that some kids have multiple personalities?
Having experienced first-hand, and from my teens, stuff like NDE, OBE, Remote Viewing, Regressions (Past lives), a lot of hypnosis, trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, Religious Inspiration, Automatic writing, and having been directly or indirectly involved with UFOs, Psychophonies, Ouija, mixed Spiritism, Card reading, Magic rituals, Homeopathy, Pendulum Dowsing, Energy healing, Chakras, Hand imposition, Horoscopes, The Urantia Book, Hermes Trismegistus, Gaia… and a bunch more that I’m surely forgetting…
I can tell you that you shouldn’t be open minded about any of it.
I won’t call those years “lost”, but all I got out of them is some Lucid Dreaming, some really cool internal experiences (without any drugs), some fun going to places (nothing beats a spring in a lost nook of a mountain forest at dawn), an extremely developed imagination, the ability to fall asleep whenever I needed (that I lost due to extreme stress overload a couple years ago), a much better understanding of the human brain, and a shitton of skepticism.
I could write a lot about my experiences, but the bottom line would be: mental skills are fine, but science rulez. Or as said by the Dalai Lama: “When science contradicts religion, accept science” (much respect).
I have had many years of formal training and education under the umbrella of science and the scientific method. This requires both skepticism and questioning.
When I say that I am open minded about subjects such as NDE, OBE and the like I mean that I’m using the aforementioned.
Obviously, science does not have the answers to everything. Science still questions everything while, at the same time, acknowledges that there is much more to know.
I have had several experiences, so far in life, that I cannot explain using what we know from science. For, at least, the past decade I’ve felt much more comfortable and inspired with more questions than I have answers.
Science and/or the scientific method is a tool. A tool that has been developed by humans. But that’s all that it is.
As with religion, I will not hold science up on a pedestal.
The problem with the expression “open minded”, is that it gets used as a way to bypass any scrutiny, by people who are scammers, believers with a mind so open that their brains fall out, or both (scammers who believe the scam). At this point, I’d rather avoid it.
From my experiences, there is nothing that some Occam’s razor can’t reduce to scientific explanations. Every time I managed to set up a scientifically sound test, they failed completely. I’ve encountered many scammers, believers, and scammer+believers claiming plenty of stuff they couldn’t even set a test for. One sentence I will never forget from a scammer+believer criticizing another one is: “they are too scientific” 🤦
Like, no, one can not be “too scientific”.
Sure, the scientific method is a “human tool”, but so far it’s the only tool humans have that can provide any useful information. Non-scientific data, is like isolated data points or clusters with no way to relate them to anything, no way to use them to predict something other than themselves, and basically useless.
So far, the only experiences I’ve encountered that don’t have any possible scientific explanation, are 2nd hand accounts from people without a scientific mindset. Since they didn’t run any data gathering at the time, and the experiences are not repeatable, they’re just isolated tales without any reference to anything real. Maybe they did happen, maybe they didn’t, maybe who knows what. Useless. (and it’s a pity, since they could’ve been really interesting if true)
Yeah, critical thinking is an important skill to have. Sadly, there is a very low percentage of people (specifically, in the USA) that have it.
I’m approximating that around 98% of the news media, here in the USA, are biased and/or propaganda. The first year of my university education taught me how to separate fact from opinion. What if you don’t go to university? How do you learn critical thinking? I have a college friend that I’ve known for almost thirty years. He has a masters degree in finance and he is a certified public accountant. However, when it comes to USA politics, he has been completely brainwashed by the media. He is one of those MAGA nut-jobs.
Having second hand accounts of anything is, certainly, unreliable. I wish more people could have, at least, one experience that fell outside of what we know from science. Unbelievably, I’ve had several of these. I’d say about five that I cannot explain using the best of our scientific knowledge.
I’m getting paywalled and can’t be bothered getting around it but I’ve read a lot about this from the researchers who study it, it’s quite interesting. Is it possible that cells can have memory? Of course. Could energy persist beyond the physical? Sure.
I wouldn’t call myself a believer but I’m definitely a curious observer.
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Marie also knows that she is not alone — that since the 1960s, more than 2,200 children from across the world have described apparent recollections from a previous life, all documented in a database maintained by the Division of Perceptual Studies within the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
“Advice to Parents of Children who are Spontaneously Recalling Past Life Memories,” reads the headline on the page of the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s website, and further down, “Contact Us,” and that is how they come to the attention of Jim Tucker.
As director of the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia for the past 10 years, Tucker has worked directly with nearly 150 families, making comprehensive records of children’s descriptions of past-life memories.
Stevenson’s ideas faced no shortage of criticism from the scientific community: Some maintain that consciousness is generated by the brain and therefore cannot survive beyond its death; others have speculated that the children he documented could be reciting “false memories,” having been unintentionally pushed toward a particular narrative by their parents.
That impression is echoed by Tom Shroder, a former Washington Post editor and author of “Old Souls: Compelling Evidence From Children Who Remember Past Lives,” who accompanied Stevenson as he studied cases in Lebanon and India.
It didn’t feel lucky in the beginning, when Ryan was waking up sobbing at night and describing things his mother couldn’t fathom: that he remembered living in Hollywood in a big white house with a swimming pool.
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