WASHINGTON: People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, regal princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a study.

The propensity to make these mistakes could, in part, explain why people cling to implausible reincarnation claims in the first place.

Researchers recruited people who, after undergoing hypnotic therapy, had come to believe that they had past lives.

Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of names: non-famous names they had already seen , famous names, and names of non-famous people that they had not previously seen. Their task was to identify which names were famous.

The researchers found that, compared to control subjects who dismissed the idea of reincarnation, past-life believers were almost twice as likely to misidentify names.

In particular, their tendency was to wrongly identify as famous the non-famous names they had seen in the first task.

This kind of error, called a source-monitoring error, indicates that a person has difficulty recognising where a memory came from.

People who make these kinds of errors might end up convincing themselves of things that aren't true, said lead researcher Maarten Peters of Maastricht University in The Netherlands.

When people who are prone to making these mistakes undergo hypnosis and are repeatedly asked to talk about a potential idea—like a past life—they might, as they grow more familiar with it, eventually convert the idea into a full-blown false memory.

This is because they can't distinguish between things that have really happened and things that have been suggested to them, Peters said.

Past life memories are not the only type of implausible memories that have been studied in this manner. Richard McNally, a psychologist at Harvard University, has found that self-proclaimed alien abductees are also twice as likely to commit source monitoring errors.

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