The children who remember their past lives
I've known for some time about the qualitative research done regarding young children who seem to recall past lives. Of course such research cannot provide the empirical evidence that double-blind controlled studies can provide, but it nonetheless raises some provocative questions. This is a gift🎁link, so you can read all of the article, even if you don't subscribe to The Washington Post. Below are some excerpts from the article:
Two-year-old Aija had invented plenty of fictional characters before, but her parents — Ross, a musician, and Marie, a psychologist — noticed right away that Nina was different.... From the time Aija learned how to talk, she talked about Nina, and her descriptions were remarkably consistent. Aija told her parents that Nina played piano, and she loved dancing, and she favored the color pink (Aija emphatically did not). When Aija spoke as Nina, in the first person, Aija’s demeanor changed: Her voice was sweeter and higher-pitched, her affect more gentle and polite than what Marie and Ross typically expected from their rambunctious toddler. [...] It all seemed more curious than concerning — until one afternoon in the early spring of 2021, when Marie came to believe that there was something more to Nina. That day, Marie recalls, she and Aija were playing together in their living room, enacting little scenes with toy figurines. Then Aija suddenly turned to her mother and said, “Nina has numbers on her arm, and they make her sad.” Marie’s mind raced. “What did you say?” she asked her daughter, willing her voice to remain calm. “Nina has numbers on her arm, and they make her sad,” Aija said again, pointing to the inside of her forearm. Then she added: “Nina misses her family. Nina was taken away from her family.” [...] Marie knows how this story might sound, and she is exceedingly careful about sharing it. Marie also knows that she is not alone — that since the 1960s,more than 2,200 children from across the world have described apparent recollections from a previous life, all documented in a database maintained by the Division of Perceptual Studies within the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Sometimes a child presents enough identifying information for relatives or researchers to pinpoint a deceased person, but that level of specificity is elusive; about a third of the cases in the database do not include such a match. [...] Certain consistent patterns have emerged: The most pronounced and convincing cases, Stevenson and Tucker both found, tend to occur in children between the ages of 2 and 6. They might suddenly describe places they have never been, people they have never met, sometimes using words or phrases that seem beyond their vocabulary. Nightmares or sleep disturbances are occasionally reported. Many of these children are highly verbal, and start speaking earlier than their peers. Their descriptions of past-life recollections often fade away entirely by the time the child turns 7 or 8.
