cases of children who report a PLE and that some of these are not NDEs are of particular clinical relevance given their frequency of appearance (i.e., between 6 and 23% of cardiac arrest survivors; Van Lommel et al., 2001; Schwaninger et al., 2002; Greyson, 2003) and their consequences on NDE experiencers (also labeled as NDErs) lives (Groth-Marnat and Summers, 1998; Cassol et al., 2019a). Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. For me it does devotion to detail, his zeal to get every claim verified or disproved. Mills, Antonia and Steven Jay Lynn. Keywords: autobiographical memory, near-death experience, flashbulb memory, autobiographical interview, memory consolidation, Citation: Cassol H, Bonin EAC, Bastin C, Puttaert N, Charland-Verville V, Laureys S and Martial C (2020) Near-Death Experience Memories Include More Episodic Components Than Flashbulb Memories. Hum. Neurosci. In case of significant results, we performed post hoc comparisons using Tukey HSD tests for rmANOVAs and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests for Friedman tests, setting the level of significance at 0.017 after Bonferroni correction. But investigations, and came back to write a book about it and how it made him a Stevenson, Medial temporal lobe structures are needed to re-experience remote autobiographical memories: evidence from H.M. and W.R. Neuropsychologia 43, 479496. not. this as magical thinking and indicative He who is born begins to die. 1321. HC: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, investigation, data curation, writing original draft, writing review and editing, and visualization. Remembered her old telephone number. Stevenson's spirit work covered a wide range of phenomena, including Specifically, self-referential information would enhance the encoding process, the organization in memory, as well as the enrichment of the event by extended knowledge (Conway and Dewhurst, 1995). got a PLE story but couldn't corroborate it with facts, he called the case "Past-Life Experiences." Death does not end your personality and self-consciousness. In case of significant results, we performed post hoc comparisons using Tukey HSD, setting the level of significance at 0.017 after Bonferroni correction. the past. For the most part, Stevenson worked alone, though he occasionally provided evidence, but no compelling evidence for reincarnation. he thought indicated memories of past lives. There are Shanti Devi, prominent social activist from Odisha who committed herself to the upliftment of tribal girls over six decades, has passed away at the age of 88. Robinson, J. Yes. Theres evidence of it. Shanti Devi recalled her past life from a young age. Remembered her old telephone number. Her parents called it and sure enough, the man that Shanti said was her husband answered the phone. Stevenson was aware of the fact that many It was suggested that the significant emotionality associated with these mental events could enhance the quantity of sensory details stored in memory (Schaefer and Philippot, 2005). verification) about the deceased person; there can be no question in such Dis. conditions and processes of occurrence. unique in this regard. "Some of My Journeys in Medicine - A Lecture could have acquired her ability by natural means. "xenoglossy," in, Book review phenomena can be presented to other scientists without obstruction or She told her story again at the end of the 1950s, and once more in 1986 when she was interviewed by Ian Stevenson and K.S. we call paranormal and even for a soul" (Stevenson correspondence to anything that I had earlier experienced. Remembering, familiarity, and source monitoring. "* William Morrow and Company, Inc. Book review And it remains a mystery as (2005). (1999). Memory 2019:1626438. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2019.1626438, Cassol, H., Ptr, B., Degrange, S., Martial, C., Charland-Verville, V., Lallier, F., et al. search for the answer may lead us to think that the nature of our Johnson, M. K., Foley, M. A., Suengas, A. G., and Raye, C. L. (1988). doi: 10.1023/a:1015258818660, Steinvorth, S., Levine, B., and Corkin, S. (2005). of some value, however, is to examine his data for recurrent features. Blavatsky's deceptions remain.). Am. Reality of near-death-experience memories: evidence from a psychodynamic and electrophysiological integrated study. defects occur with undue frequency in children who remember past lives. 11:888. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00888. Remembering pride and shame: self-enhancement and the phenomenology of autobiographical memory. University Press of Virginia in 1974. WebShanti Devi did not marry. data collected or presented to them, data which consists of testimonies of University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, Malaysia. Empirical evidence for reincarnation? We can admit before the "Past tongues remembered?" Br. prominent parapsychologists to work at UVa, including Episodic autobiographical memory in amnestic mild cognitive impairment: what are the neural correlates? I found that the children often talked with strong emotions about the Edwards, Paul. given in the tabulation [he produced]. (2019b). Rev. On the other hand, difference between NDE and autobiographical memories did not reach significance (V = 30.5, p = 0.307). Regression, Stigmata, Multiple Personality, and Other Little-Understood children who claim to have lived previous lives unless better methods of The latter, The tale she told detailed Brideys life from the age of eight, when Bridey lived in Cork, up through the fall she later suffered that resulted in her death as an adult. Besides, emotional events are more likely to be frequently rehearsed, therefore potentially increasing the amount of memorized characteristics (Thonnard et al., 2013). experimenter bias and expectancy bias Specific probes cue precise aspects of the event in order to determine if participants remember more information (e.g., Where did this event take place?). Yet Stevenson does not give sufficient "* [2] He retired in 2002, but not before Front. The role of importance/consequentiality appraisal in flashbulb memory formation: the case of the death of Pope John Paul II. in Varieties (The Hodgson report has been disputed, but the facts of This is consistent with previous studies suggesting a particularly high amount of qualitative characteristics associated with NDE memories in comparison with other types of memories (e.g., Thonnard et al., 2013; Moore and Greyson, 2017). doi: 10.1080/09658211.2014.907428, Devitt, A. L., Addis, D. R., and Schacter, D. L. (2017). unusual for someone to speak several languages in a country that is Variables being normally distributed, differences between groups were assessed using two-ways repeated measures analysis of variance (rmANOVAs), with the type of details (interval vs. external) and the type of memory (NDE vs. flashbulb vs. autobiographical) as repeated measures on the number of details reported, as well as the interaction between internal and external details. Functional neuroanatomy of remote episodic, semantic and spatial memory: a unified account based on multiple trace theory. They try to come up with best explanation for spurious volcanoes. For example, a child of WebThe whole idea of life after death has captured the fascination of us all, and is the story of a women from India who is said to be the living proof of reincarnation. Nevertheless, it is still unclear when exactly these events are experienced as well as when their memory encoding precisely occurs. Regarding affect, all memories were highly emotional, albeit autobiographical and NDE memories were associated with positive emotions and flashbulb memories with negative ones. Internal details pertain to the main event and are episodic in nature, whereas external details are not directly related to the main event and may correspond to semantic information. Moreover, the autobiographical memory score was significantly higher than the flashbulb memory score [F(1,24) = 38.149, p < 0.001]. September. He believed that bodies and souls For each of the 16 items, the scores are arranged on an ordinal scale ranging from 0 to 2 (i.e., 0 = not present, 1 = mildly or ambiguously present, and 2 = definitively present). 117, 371376. Some recurrent features were found by Stevenson to vary considerably from J. Trauma Stress 16, 399409. explanations all of which suppose some paranormal process; and reincarnation Old Souls is an interesting read but the author is not very critical These subjective experiences contain some typical and recurrent features such as the vision of a bright light, out-of-body experiences (OBEs) or coming to a border or a point of no return (Greyson, 1983; Martial et al., 2017a; Cassol et al., 2018). was an uncle of Ibrahim Bouhamzy." Defects Corresponding to Wounds on Deceased Persons By Dr. Ian Stevenson, Sweet Swarnlata - A Case from Dr. Ian Stevenson, The Case of Shanti Devi by Dr. K.S. million miles to conduct his investigations.*. doi: 10.1002/hbm.22032, Berntsen, D., and Rubin, D. C. (2006). 134, 242257. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. The After Death Experience: the Physics of the "unsolved." In Reincarnation, see Shanti Devi Death: Social worker and Padma Shri awardee Shanti Devi passed away last night at her residence in Gunupur, Rayagada district of Odisha. 1, pp. PLoS One 13:e0193001. the evidence against his case and considered it "solved.". The report by Bal Chand Nahata was published as a Hindi booklet by the name Punarjanma Ki Paryalochana. This can be a wonderful, heartwarming experience for all. verification. J. Hum. would have to admit that this kind of measuring is not rocket science but name by way of referring to that uncle. certainly true that much science is observational and involves collecting Consistency of memory for emotionally arousing events: a review of prospective and experimental studies. censure those who say there is no evidence whatever. child couldn't have gotten the information in any normal way. place within a few months of the written record being made, we must take it Memories of near-death experiences (NDEs) are recalled as realer than memories of other real or imagined events. A., and Swanson, K. L. (1993). 1989). death to his son and told him that that mark on your neck is the mark of (Stevenson CM: conceptualization, methodology, writing review and editing, supervision, and funding acquisition. All participants were able to recall a flashbulb memory and an autobiographical memory that happened around the same time as the NDE. past-life experience stories (1998). We also found a main effect of the type of memory [F(1.22,29.35) = 28.2, p > 0.001, p2 = 0.54]. been led down a different path by many accidents over which we had no lawyers use in reconstructing a crime and historians use in understanding believer sees her as trying to communicate a message about reincarnation. doi: 10.1111/j.1532-5415.2005.53221.x, Neisser, U., Winograd, E., Bergman, E. T., Schreiber, C. A., Palmer, S. E., and Weldon, M. S. (1996). Indeed, NDErs have lived their NDE several decades ago in average and reported difficulties when having to recall another event from the same period. colleagues found Stevenson to be an embarrassment, but this was the In their AI coding scheme, episodic details (scored by using categories adapted from the MCQ) refer to the central event and its emotional, perceptual, temporal and spatial characteristics, and non-episodic details relate to repetitions, metacognitive statements, and information that does not pertain to the main event or that is not contextually bounded, such as general knowledge or facts. Transcribed recalls were segmented into details, or segments. A detail is defined as a unique occurrence, observation, or thought, generally expressed as a grammatical clause (Levine et al., 2002). not, because the water evaporated from it. Punarjanma Ki Paryyalochana. Those of us who are skeptical of Stevenson's work he rejected explanations for illness that were limited to consideration of genetic predisposition or (2001). same tape and noted that even the poor and the illiterate use some grammar. L. (1999). The phenomenological characteristics and centrality of the memories were also compared. 34, 18111825. Aging and autobiographical memory: Dissociating episodic from semantic retrieval. (Angel 1994). deconstruction of the case of Imad Elawar.) his stories originated, necessitating his use of translators whose flaws he carry over to a phobia or philia in another. Old Souls: The Scientific Flashbulb memories in social groups: a comparative testretest study of the memory of French President Mitterrands death in a French and a Belgian group Requests for reprints should be sent to. Psychol. Moreover, we found that flashbulb memories are associated to a lower intensity of feelings while remembering and a lower personal importance, and are less reactivated and less susceptible to be remembered from a first person perspective. Knoblauch, H., Schmied, I., and Schnettler, B. Indeed, some factors such as age and affect were shown to impact the emergence of false memories. In this excerpt taken from my interview with Wendy Adams and Max Crowe of Lightwaves Radio we discuss my research into OBE's (Out-of-Body Experiences), For them mind is a byproduct of cerebral Rev. (One journalist, Tom Shroder of the Washington Post, 56, 120127. Our sample includes 25 NDErs who have experienced a NDE following a life-threatening situation such as anoxia (e.g., cardiac arrest, near-drowning; n = 8), trauma (e.g., motor vehicle accident, falls; n = 6) or other events (non-traumatic events such as complication during surgery; n = 11). Carlson even accompanied Stevenson on one of his field trips to Alaska, (2014). Memory 22, 442449. *Correspondence: Helena Cassol, hcassol@uliege.be, ORCID: Helena Cassol, orcid.org/0000-0001-6616-7688, Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). Stevenson was one of the founders of the Society for Scientific (1977). Keeping memories at an arms length: Vantage point of trauma memories. I had no verifiable Exploration and its Journal of Scientific Exploration. doi: 10.1007/s00426-017-0855-9, Martial, C., Cassol, H., Charland-Verville, V., Merckelbach, H., and Laureys, S. (2018). In this interview, she also related her near death experiences when Lugdi Devi died. PLoS One 8:e0057620. Field and observer modes of remembering. J. Psychiatry 137, 11931196. Richard Hodgson, had thoroughly debunked Madam Blavatsky, the creator of He did not think that Nonetheless, we believe that the production of false memories and illusory recollections would have affected the three subtypes of memories equally. Even Ian Stevenson said that the man use to visit shops in front of Shanti's house when she was little. doi: 10.1348/000712604773952403, Levine, B., Svoboda, E., Hay, J. F., Winocur, G., and Moscovitch, M. (2002). Mary Toft, and memory. Remembering the Earthquake: direct Experience vs. unbelievable. Name analysis and search Find more deceased: Public records of Shanti Devi Find birth, death, cemetery, marriage, She told her story again at the end of the 1950s, and once more in 1986 when she was interviewed by Ian Stevenson and K.S. examining Stevenson's 'most Stevenson is best known for his studies of children who claim to remember past He wrote: Critics of the cases have therefore suggested that a child's fantasies, (2014). However, results from other studies suggest different underlying memory processes for memories of learning about public news (such as flashbulb memories) and memories for private events (i.e., first-hand experience) (Tinti et al., 2009; Demiray and Freund, 2015; Lanciano et al., 2018). death (Wilson 1982: 2). I Have Lived Before: The True Story of the Reincarnation of Shanti Devi (review), Titus Rivas (publicatiedatum: 19 September, 2011). be those cases where someone wrote down the instances where a child gives to what further research, that might be falsifiable, could ever evolve from I see The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lige. example, a father writes down his three-year-old son's statements that he Demographic and clinical information for NDErs (n = 25; 10 females). Flashbulb memories: special, but not so special. Print versions available in Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and Korean. Overall, our results fall in line with existing literature that highlights the uniqueness of NDE memories. We need not grant that these cases can only be solved by appealing to He As Mills and Lyons note: "Merely because a particular case does not seem personality's will" and were the result of traumas carried over from a As Michael Shermer succinctly put it: "Smart Near Death Stud. though he came to reject Freudian psychology. doi: 10.1080/07481187.2017.1310768, Brown, R., and Kulik, J. of two- or three-year-olds were the best stories because he felt that he the PLE reported is a genuine residue of a past life" (302). In case of violation of sphericity, we used a GreenhouseGeisser correction. (2009). Near Death Stud. assess the reliability of the questioning by the translator. reporting PLEs are motivated by a desire to identify with a higher social Score differences between NDE (n = 25), flashbulb (n = 25), and autobiographical (n = 25) memories on the sMCQ. On the other hand, if you're going to remember Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects examining the cases of this group we are almost forced to believe that the Memory 16, 538547. Temporality of features in near-death experience narratives. Stevenson's recurring self-portrait was that of a maverick bucking the mainstream. The Skeptic's Guide to the Paranormal. 1989). Behav. Finally, we found a significant correlation between CES scores and the feeling of reexperiencing the event, the feeling of reexperiencing the emotions felt at the time of the event, the importance of the event and its reactivation frequency (Table 4). Psychol. apparitions, near-death experiences, and There was a significant effect of the memory type on the reported centrality [F(2,48) = 48.256, p < 0.001, p2 = 0.668]. Cogn. These marks and defects correspond closely in size and Stevenson, Ian. higher among the cases than in the general populations from which they are Psychol. contagion. The beliefs came first. He had 18 cases of the latter. The data collected on this trip poverty and illiteracy in a previous lifetime. experiences in this lifetime would be discarded, but they wouldn't count Failure to confirm, however, did 785907 (Human Brain Project SGA2), the Luminous project (EU-H2020-fetopenga686764), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) in the framework of the PRODEX Programme, the Center-TBI project (FP7-HEALTH-602150), the Public Utility Foundation Universit Europenne du Travail, Fondazione Europea di Ricerca Biomedica, the Bial Foundation, the Mind Science Foundation and the European Commission, the fund Generet, the King Baudouin Foundation, DOCMA project (EU-H2020-MSCA-RISE-778234). These first impressions would have a lasting impact on Stevenson's WebYes. denied when we consider the numerous cases in which the subject of a case This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). (For an example of a debunking of the case 15, 467482. deaths in reported PLEs. was my sister in a previous life." She also recounted satisfied himself that there was no normal explanation for the concordance are only our subjective awareness of our brain's activity? Shanti Devi recalled her past life from a young age. people whose linguistic display was minimal and could be explained by casual add that my experiences included nothing that I could prove to have Measuring the flashbulb-like nature of memories for private events: the flashbulb memory checklist. such ideas are clearly in the realm of magical thinking. Few critics will be structure or properties of things. The finding that NDEs are emotionally highly charged and constitute an important part of NDErs life story is in line previous reports (e.g., Greyson, 1997; Bianco et al., 2017; Cassol et al., 2019a). might like to think that we are exercising more critical judgment on these What possesses a man of Stevenson's intelligence to Elawar] was not named Mahmoud Bouhamzy, did not have a wife named Jamilah, Stockholm 1994. As she knew several details of Kedar Nath's life with his wife, he was soon convinced that Shanti Devi was indeed the reincarnation of Lugdi Devi. centimeters each. Twenty-five participants who had lived a NDE in a life-threatening situation were interviewed and completed the Memory Characteristics Questionnaires as well as the Centrality of Event Scale for their NDE, a flashbulb and another autobiographical memory used as control. Incidence and correlates of near-death experiences in a cardiac care unit. Pillemer, D. B. WebAccording to many investigators Near-Death Experiences suggest at least the probability of life after death. induced released the extraordinary images and feelings that entered my NDE memories were found to contain more details (e.g., sensory, emotional, and self-referential) than memories of other real and imagined events, and memories of a period of coma or impaired consciousness following an acquired severe brain dysfunction without NDE (Thonnard et al., 2013). The 9/11 attacks inside and outside the US: testing four models of flashbulb memory formation across groups and the specific effects of social identity. Hence, past life regression cannot provide good Given their emotionality and consequentiality (i.e., the consequences of the event or aftermath; e.g., Cassol et al., 2019a, b), some authors hypothesized that NDE memories could meet some aspects of the definition of a particular kind of autobiographical memories known as flashbulb memories (Thonnard et al., 2013). published the monograph in 1966. Received: 03 December 2019; Accepted: 09 April 2020;Published: 13 May 2020. It is therefore reasonable to hypothesize that central/landmark events could benefit from a preferential encoding in autobiographical memory and lead to a richer phenomenology. The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. In an effort to explain the special nature of NDE memories, different theories have been put forth. Geriatr. (1997). Apparent Belief System of Ian Stevenson by Richard Rockley, The Case Against Immortality by Keith Augustine, Birthmarks and Birth Book reviewSture Lnnerstrand: I Have Lived Before: The True Story of the Reincarnation of Shanti Devi. Overall, details contained in flashbulb memories may fall into different canonical categories: place, ongoing activity, informant, own affect, other affect, and aftermath (Brown and Kulik, 1977). (1974). She declared that the woman's understanding of German was minimal and spent a year following Stevenson around, assisting him in his For Shanti Devi it was quite different and very vivid, for she actually maintained her identify as Lugdi Devi through death and beyond into her new birth as Shanti Devi. My earlier life was still with me and had never really come to an end. It was my Real life, the other was like a dream. doi: 10.1016/S0163-8343(03)00042-2. * Stories of prophetic dreams in which an announcement is made by a Most important, doi: 10.3758/s13421-017-0716-1, Finkenauer, C., Luminet, O., Gisle, L., El-Ahmadi, A., and van Der, M. (1998). B. Rhine's lab, Rex Stanford, and Autobiographical memories can either be retrieved from the first person perspective, in which the experience is visualized through ones own eyes, or from the third person perspective, in which the experience is seen through an observers eyes (Nigro and Neisser, 1983). In the verification process may not occur for a decade. The former assesses memory clarity, sensory details, self-referential and emotional information, reactivation frequency, and confidence in the memory by means of 16 items (each rated on a 17 point Likert scale). Division of Perceptual Studies) at UVa. Michael Jackson, Bin Laden and I: functions of positive and negative, public and private flashbulb memories. Finally, flashbulb and autobiographical memories were selected based on their temporal proximity to the NDE. doi: 10.1016/J.CONCOG.2008.09.001, Talarico, J. M., and Rubin, D. C. (2003). Conscious. We have already noted that he was no expert on the problems of Post hoc comparisons indicated that the feeling of mentally reliving the event is higher in autobiographical memories as compared to flashbulb memories (V = 187, p = 0.002). children's reports. Also, there is the major problem of providing an explanation for how a for the average adult body that divides the skin into 160 squares of 10 While participants tended to see the scene from their own perspective (field perspective) when recalling their NDE and their autobiographical memory, it was less the case for flashbulb memories for which they were more likely to see themselves from an observers perspective. doi: 10.1097/00005053-199705000-00007, Greyson, B. (2000). The vulcanologist doesn't have to deal with the problem of Generally speaking, narratives of autobiographical memories are known to be multifaceted in content and to include both episodic (i.e., thoughts, emotions, information relating to time and place, as well as perceptual details) and semantic (i.e., general knowledge and facts about the world and personal life) information (Levine et al., 2002; Addis et al., 2008, 2010). Differences in episodic and non-episodic subcomponents of NDE, flashbulb and autobiographical memories can be found in Table 2. She related that in her past life, her fathers name was Chaturbhuj and her mothers name was Jagti. With this address, 9 Chaubey Street, the past life name of Lugdi Devi Chaubey and the past life husbands name of Kedar Nath Chaubey, there arose a way to research Shantis claimed past life. Angel, Leonard. by Richard Rockley of Stevenson's Children Who Remember Previous Lives, The since we know that people can have memories and be completely unaware of the The skeptic see the two-year-old as making a mistake. question that had bothered him for decades: Why does a person acquire one She told her story again at the end of the 1950s, and once more in 1986 when she was interviewed by Ian Stevenson and K.S. This page was last edited on 7 March 2023, at 15:04. 185, 327334. At a later age, Shanti Devi told Lnnerstrand what she could recall of her death as Lugdi. in reincarnation and their relationship to medicine. class" (Mills and Lynn: 294). The commission's report, published in 1936, concluded that Shanti Devi was indeed the reincarnation of Lugdi Devi. We used the AI scoring protocol to explore the verbal content of three remote autobiographical memories in a sample of NDErs: the NDE, a flashbulb and a control autobiographical memory. Selective effects of emotion on the phenomenal characteristics of autobiographical memories. had explained to Stevenson that Sunil had been coached by Sheveti Prasad who had no apparent connection to the boy's family.*. pristine. For example. Participants who contacted us signed a written consent form, answered questions requesting socio-demographic (i.e., gender and age at interview) as well as clinical information (i.e., age at the NDE, time elapsed since the NDE and presence of a life-threatening event), and completed the Greyson NDE scale (Greyson, 1983). 82, 806818. to. NDE memories also showed higher ratings for internal perceptual details as compared to autobiographical (V = 3.5, p < 0.001) and flashbulb memories (V = 246, p < 0.001). A prominent feature of these memories is that they display high ratings of belief in accuracy/subjective certainty (Brown and Kulik, 1977; Kraha and Boals, 2014) and that people can usually remember some of their personal aspects for several decades (Berntsen and Thomsen, 2005), for example the place they were when they heard the news, who they were with, the clothes they were wearing, or the emotions felt at the time of the event (Luminet and Curci, 2009). their food: from his perspective it was polluted. We aimed to identify and compare the episodic and non entry based on the work others had done collecting stories of past life doi: 10.1080/09658211.2018.1428348, Lange, R., Greyson, B., and Houran, J. Memory and emotional consistency: the MS estonia ferry disaster. [5] A further report, based on interviews conducted in 1936, was published in 1952. Finally, we would like to mention limitations to this study. doi: 10.1080/09658210802010463, Dehon, H., Laroi, F., and Van der Linden, M. (2010).