Past-Life Regression: An Illusion Made by the Brain?

"Past-Life Regression… and You're Under!"

So what actually happens in the brain at that moment?

1. The gaps get filled with false memories. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus said, "Blanks in memory are automatically corrected with imagination or outside images."

2. Imagination becomes a real event. In Loftus's famous experiment, people who repeatedly imagined "I once got lost in a shopping mall" came to believe it had really happened.

3. The original memory keeps changing. According to memory researchers such as Daniel Schacter, every time we recall something, the hippocampus reassembles it, and the memory changes.

Why It Matters to Separate Memory from Belief

"The desire for immortality is the root of all human myths"

Freud and Carl Jung observed that people don't really believe in their own annihilation, and the scholar Ernest Becker argued that the desire for immortality is the root of all human myth-making. Yet the only one that gets criticized is Christianity's creation account. Judgment in heaven and hell is scary, right? So people just believe in past lives instead. For the record, it can't be verified — but for all we know, a ghost moonlighting at a fortune-teller's shop could take a day off and plant past-life memories in children.