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

I've always thought it was funny & sad that past lives fantasists always remember being winners, and never losers. Perhaps in the future people will remember being Paris Hilton.

I've always thought it was funny & sad that past lives fantasists always remember being winners, and never losers.

if one takes this stuff 'literally' most of the time people would be animals. and perhaps animals have bad memories? also, since the number of humans is growing each generation we need more souls? or do some souls get but on the "bench" and brought back later....

Razib: arent we getting close to the theater of the absurd here?

So many people at the same time have believed they were Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and a handful of other historical figures. So that leads to the obvious logical conclusion: A great historical soul can get duplicated or somehow spread out and occupy multiple bodies at once.

What other conclusion could explain this phenomenon?

Razib: arent we getting close to the theater of the absurd here?

life is absurd. that's why i believe.

A great historical soul can get duplicated or somehow spread out and occupy multiple bodies at once.

right, you need a "weighting parameter" for the e(x) of incarnation within a particular body at any given time. but that begs the question: the long term "fame" of the soul is then diluted. you probably an 'equilibrium fame' which is modal in the distribution of souls in the reincarnatable soul pool.

LOL

Least I heard, Cleopatra is now a business woman in Delhi, India. She's currently under investigation for securities fraud. (Woman always overestimated her smarts.)

In most of my past lives I usually ended up getting eaten by something. You suffer massive trauma, go into shock, and while the predator is ripping out chunks of your flesh you pass away. After a few repeats it starts to get routine. As this bhoddivata vulture once put it, "A thousand deaths is not cowardice, it is merely repetition."

(Am I serious or ... :) (For the answer to that question you only have to die. :D ))

I've always thought it was funny & sad that past lives fantasists always remember being winners, and never losers.

Not true. Plenty of reported past life memories involve humble, ordinary and even painful conditions. If you actually looked into the subject with any seriousness you would find this out.

A friend of mine who works as a hypnotherapist tells me that (pseudo)memories of past lives help patients maintain the distinction between their memories of real events and their memories of things that didn't actually happen.

e.g. It's much safer to have a false memory of doing something when you were Julius Caesar than it is to have a false memory of doing something as yourself (which you can't distinguish from your real memories).

Even if these memories of past lives didn't really, literally happen, they might be an important feature of how the human brain organizes memory.

"So many people at the same time have believed they were Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and a handful of other historical figures. So that leads to the obvious logical conclusion: A great historical soul can get duplicated or somehow spread out and occupy multiple bodies at once.

What other conclusion could explain this phenomenon?"

Travel of these souls thru time would be another interpretation. Heck, maybe there's just a single human soul that has a very tangled four-dimensional tragectory.