This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 4, Issue 6, from 1990.
Melvin Harris’s article ‘Many Happy Returns’ published in The Skeptic Vol 4 No 4 reports a commendable journalistic investigation of claims for evidence of reincarnation derived from hypnotic ‘past life regressions’. Ian Wilson has also written a similar account in his book Mind Out of Time [1]. I should like to add my own thoughts to these discussions although I ought to say that I myself have not undertaken any ‘past life’ regression work, only age regression for therapeutic and demonstration purposes.
Memory as a creative process
My first point is that, while I do not believe that subjects of ‘past life regressions’ actually relive previous incarnations, I feel that the explanations offered by both Harris and Wilson in terms of cryptomnesia are rather weak and do not draw adequately on what is known about the nature of human memory. Contrary to one’s subjective impressions, memory, like perception, is an active, constructive process, whereby the mind creates an image, idea, experience or whatever from a limited set of raw sensations or memory traces.
We can think of a memory as an inference based on fragments of material; memories and fantasies are rapidly synthesised around such data points, both internal and external, so that cues and prompts greatly facilitate the process of remembering, and recognition memory, of course, is considerably superior to spontaneous unaided recall.
So memory is not like a videotape loop. Ian Wilson uses that simple model to account for the vividness and accuracy of detail of some ‘past life regressions’. He refers to work of the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield to support the model. Penfield [2] electrically stimulated portions of exposed cortex of patients on whom he was operating for the alleviation of severe refractory epilepsy. Some patients thus stimulated appeared to relive with great vividness seemingly remote events in their lives, as though indeed an internal ‘videotape loop’ had been triggered. However only a small minority of patients (less than 4%) showed this effect and there is no reason to suppose that their experiences represented accurate memories.
The nature of fantasy
I believe we underestimate people’s ability to fantasise creatively and with great vividness and detail. The act of imagining one has a previous life may provide a focus around which fantasies and actual memories may crystallise and form a quite elaborate structure. This is not so different from those tasks set by our history teacher such as ‘Imagine you are a sailor in Nelson’s fleet’. Similar creative activities are the improvisation of a role by an actor or actress and the development of a character by a novelist.
The effects of priming and compliance
With hypnotic age regressions, as with any regression, we also need to take into account the possible effects of priming, that is, the subjects’ knowing in advance that they are going to be ‘regressed to a previous life’. Under such circumstances, subjects would be able to rehearse their impending performance. Neither should we underestimate the motivation of the subject to comply with the demands of the ‘past life regressor’, even to the point of denying prior knowledge of material elicited. (Here I find the ideas of Wagstaff [3] very useful and convincing.) I find it hard to accept Melvin Harris ‘s interpretation of Jane Evans ‘s numerous past lives in terms of cryptomnesia, because of the sheer weight of material provided, apparently extracted from several novels. A blanket of source amnesia for such a plethora of detail seems intuitively unlikely. Moreover the literature on hypnosis does not indicate that the recall of factual information is enhanced by hypnosis (although there is good anecdotal evidence from clinical practice of a facilitation of retrieval of repressed traumatic memories). I suspect that the extensive ‘cryptomnesia’ evident in some cases is mostly due to the demands made on the subject to produce a large quantity of seemingly factual information and to deny any previous awareness of it. This is essential for the authenticity of the ‘past life’ experience.
Variations on past life regression instructions
Informal experiments [4] have suggested that if you ask subjects to pretend as hard as they can that they are reliving a past life, then their enactments are no less convincing than those of subjects who are put through the hypnotic induction and regression procedures. (As the Bloxham tapes testify, most will be mundane and unconvincing [5] but there are some subjects, perhaps those that have a particularly well-developed facility for creative fantasy who produce vivid and convincing enactments of ‘previous lives’.) From what is known about hypnotic age regression this finding would not be surprising.
I predict that if the instructions to return to a past life are framed in such a way as to permit the subject to display prior know ledge of the details elicited, then source amnesia will diminish without compromising the realism and intensity of the experience. In fact I would go as far as to say that the hypnotic regression procedure imposes unnecessary restrictions on the capacity of many subjects to experience a ‘past life’ because of the demand for source amnesia. This demand may be removed by, for example, informing subjects that by using all their knowledge of history gleaned from lessons at school, films, television programmes, books, etc, they will find that their imagination will allow them to enact vividly and realistically the role of a person who lived some time before they were born. (Perhaps the period of history could be chosen by the subject beforehand.) A preliminary period of relaxation and contemplation may be useful to help the subject think himself or herself into the role but, as with age regression, a key factor is the behaviour of the experimenter who must guide and encourage the subject to develop his or her imagery and must adopt a role which is congruent with the role adopted by the subject.
Conclusion
It is understandable that the topic of ‘past life’ regression should be shunned by psychologists because of its obvious occult and unscientific connotations. If however we view this phenomenon in the context of the study of role enactment and the capacity of individuals to have creative fantasies (and, incidentally, how this capacity may be developed) then there is no reason why experimental psychologists should not regard the subject as a valid one for scientific enquiry.
References
- [1] Wilson, Mind out of Time? Reincarnation Investigated, Victor Gollancz, London, (1980).
- [2] W Penfield and L Roberts, Speech and Brain Mechanisms., Princeton University Press, Princeton, NI, (1959).
- [3] G F Wagstaff, Hypnosis, Compliance and Belief, Harvester Press, Brighton, (1981).
- [4] M T Orme, Paper presented at ‘Measurement and experimental control in hypnosis’. Symposium of the Metropolitan Branch of the British Society of Experimental and Clinical Hypnosis, University College London, (1982).
