Autism and Reincarnation

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Hmm ...

[fiction]

Hello, I'm Queen Min; also known as Empress Myeongseong, or "효자원성정화합천홍공성덕명성태황후". Why did you have me killed, dismembered, and cremated? Do you have any idea how painfull that was? And then you scattered my ashes so that no one could weep for me.

At least it is good to see that my dreams of a modern and prosperous Hanguk have come to full fruition.

Too bad about that ignorant butterball with the bad haircut to the north. I knew him when he was only a stable-boy's pet rat.

[/fiction]

At least it would explain my appetite for kimchee and rice ...

Another aspect of this that I find interesting to play with is the nature of memory.

Anyone who has spent any time with a person with Alzheimers will be fairly well convinced that memory is a function of the tissues of the brain. Gunk it up with amyloid plaques, get some accelerated apoptosis going in the neurons of the hippocampus and temporal lobe and as sure as night follows day, memories go away and new ones never get made from the present moment.

The studies from traumatic brain injury also show a strong relationship between the ability to remember and an intact central nervous system with the pathways of memory creation and maintenance undamaged.

We have a discussion in another thread about earliest memories and some people find it hard to believe that anyone remembers earlier parts of their childhood because their memories of that stage of their lives are so completely absent.

Despite this, we are to believe that reincarnated souls remember past lives. They have some other, non neurological memory that remains functional despite total loss of hippocampus, temporal lobes, neural pathways of any kind.

If such disembodied memory were possible, how would it become accessible to and integrated with the normal memory that is created in the processing of experience in working memory and conversion of working memory to semantic and episodic memory?

There are plenty of remarkable cases like James Brady that illustrate the plasticity of the brain. New pathways can be generated to bypass damaged areas and functional areas repurposed to compensate for loss or damage. But memory seems pretty vulnerable. But if there are disembodied memories and some kind of cosmic server where the backup data is held until reincarnation, can we access it in the living to recover memory lost to brain injury or disease?

It's one of the many aspects of this idea that tends to make me think: no, no reason to believe in this at all.

On the one hand, There is the testimony of people like Ian Stevenson, and on the other everything that's known about how memory works.

And then, looking into Stevenson it turns out that he had a firm belief in a certain outcome to his research:
http://skepdic.com/stevenson.html

There is reason there to doubt him. Is there reason to trust him? Can an adult create a situation in an interview with a child that results in the child telling the adult the things they want to hear?

It's something that does sometimes occur:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial

No proof, but there is a quite plausible explanation for why children would sometimes make such statements to adults who want to hear them.

So, on the one hand very sketchy evidence and on the other many good reasons to suspect it just isn't so.

I can imagine scenarios that would change my current views, but at the moment, it just isn't believable. If you find yourself wanting to believe it, I wonder why? What would it mean if it were true?

In a self interested way I wonder: Will they be recovering my mother's lost memories from the etheric backup tapes any time soon, or do we have to wait until she is dead?

I suspect the question will never really be a relevant one because memory is something that actually happens in brains.

Ian Stevenson’s Case for the Afterlife: Are We ‘Skeptics’ Really Just Cynics?

By Jesse Bering |

If you’re anything like me, with eyes that roll over to the back of your head whenever you hear words like “reincarnation” or “parapsychology,” if you suffer great paroxysms of despair for human intelligence whenever you catch a glimpse of that dandelion-colored cover of Heaven Is For Real or other such books, and become angry when hearing about an overly Botoxed charlatan telling a poor grieving mother how her daughter’s spirit is standing behind her, then keep reading, because you’re precisely the type of person who should be aware of the late Professor Ian Stevenson’s research on children’s memories of previous lives.

I’d be happy to say it’s all complete and utter nonsense—a moldering cesspool of irredeemable, anti-scientific drivel. The trouble is, it’s not entirely apparent to me that it is. So why aren’t scientists taking Stevenson’s data more seriously? The data don’t “fit” our working model of materialistic brain science, surely. But does our refusal to even look at his findings, let alone to debate them, come down to our fear of being wrong? “The wish not to believe,” Stevenson once said, “can influence as strongly as the wish to believe.”

Stevenson’s magnum opus, published in 1997, was a 2,268-page, two-volume work called Reincarnation and Biology. Many of his subjects had unusual birthmarks and birth defects, such as finger deformities, underdeveloped ears, or being born without a lower leg. There were scar-like, hypopigmented birthmarks and port-wine stains, and some awfully strange-looking moles in areas where you almost never find moles, like on the soles of the feet. Reincarnation and Biology contained 225 case reports of children who remembered previous lives and who also had physical anomalies that matched those previous lives, details that could in some cases be confirmed by the dead person’s autopsy record and photos.

A Turkish boy whose face was congenitally underdeveloped on the right side said he remembered the life of a man who died from a shotgun blast at point-blank range. A Burmese girl born without her lower right leg had talked about the life of a girl run over by a train. On the back of the head of a little boy in Thailand was a small, round puckered birthmark, and at the front was a larger, irregular birthmark, resembling the entry and exit wounds of a bullet; Stevenson had already confirmed the details of the boy’s statements about the life of a man who’d been shot in the head from behind with a rifle, so that seemed to fit. And a child in India who said he remembered the life of boy who’d lost the fingers of his right hand in a fodder-chopping machine mishap was born with boneless stubs for fingers on his right hand only. This type of “unilateral brachydactyly” is so rare, Stevenson pointed out, that he couldn’t find a single medical publication of another case.

The psychiatrist found several patterns in his work on children’s memories of previous lives. First, he was convinced that there is only a brief window of time—between the ages of about two and five—in which some children retain these reminiscences of an earlier self. Importantly, their statements are, in principle at least, empirically falsifiable. If adults don’t automatically dismiss young children’s utterances as gibberish, any spontaneous comments suggestive of a past life can be carefully recorded, so researchers like Stevenson might later confirm or disconfirm their accounts. Also, as with the Sri Lankan girl, memories of previous lives tend to occur only when something in the child’s current life jars the recollections awake (in cognitive science terms, a form of recognition memory). In other words, it’s mostly useless to “interview” a child about his or her past life, since—like remembering one’s dream from the night before only while lying in bed tonight—recall can’t be forced on the spot. Stevenson also believed that although past lives may be common, only a small percentage of children retained any memories of their previous existence. Even in India, where nearly everyone believes in reincarnation and it’s nothing special, only about one in every 500 children fit the bill.

read more:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/ber ... st-cynics/

For an astoundingly meticulous work on the same subject matter that also addresses fundamental scientific issues - may I recommend , Return from Life, by Jim B. Tucker - Professor - University of Virginia

http://www.jimbtucker.com/return-to-life.html

For your own entertainment and enjoyment - you might try watching this British Documentary



and this 1992 BBC documentary




P.S. I absolutely do not agree with the OP that there is some kind of reincarnation connection between holocaust victims and people with Autism

Perhaps in the end it comes down to asking yourself, as you read these accounts or watch these videos, 'is this really compelling, or do I want to believe?'[/quote]

Something that seems self-evident to me, if this stuff is real there's apparently no low-hanging fruit. If it were the case people wouldn't meditate for years on end to do things like raise kundalini or be able to have the experience of strolling the universe in other layers of their minds. The concept of magical or mystic initiations would be superfluous. Come to think of it there never would have been any mystery institutions in the ancient world (which was loaded with them) - save outside of the Marxist context of the rich finding and inventing new ways to bilk the poor.

Even if there were something to all of the above it wouldn't prove reincarnation because it would give a 'yes' to subjective experience but it would give nothing to scientific instrumentation. Double-slit/Quantum eraser and Global Consciousness Project seem to suggest that people like Carl Jung or Teilhard de Chardin weren't perhaps as crazy as a lot of people like to think these days but even that - circumstantial evidence of a collective unconscious would not be evidence of reincarnation - just of consciousness or at least things that react to consciousness without touch outside the human body. Past that point it's all sorting through subjective exploration being compared and contrasted.

That said anecdote from the corridors of esoteric Buddhism, Hinduism, and Hermeticism/Neoplatonism would all suggest reincarnation - including their greatest minds and teachers some of whose philosophies we still employ today. From that perspective I think it's worth discussing as a good possibility even if there's absolutely no 'proof' in the laboratory sense.