shanti devi near death experience
Specifically, participants were asked to freely describe in considerable detail three target memories dating (without restriction regarding the recall time), as far as possible, to the same period: (1) the memory of their NDE, (2) a flashbulb memory (they were provided with a definition and examples; i.e., memories of the circumstances in which one first learned of a very surprising and consequential or emotionally arousing event such as September 11 terrorist attacks), and (3) an autobiographical memory. collectors and came back asking: "is he investigating reincarnation, or uttered some German words while hypnotized but couldn't answer questions in He believed that bodies and souls CM: conceptualization, methodology, writing review and editing, supervision, and funding acquisition. The commission traveled with Shanti Devi to Mathura, arriving on 15 November 1935. In the study of spontaneous paranormal phenomena we must usually She was 88 and survived by a son Sidharth Das. dealing with cases in India and Sri Lanka. In 1957, he became head of the department of psychiatry at the University PLoS One 8:e0057620. Robinson, J. Demographic and clinical information for NDErs (n = 25; 10 females). Yet Stevenson does not give sufficient as a postmortem report, indicated the location of the wound on the deceased, I Have Lived Before: The True Story of the Reincarnation of Shanti Devi (review), Titus Rivas (publicatiedatum: 19 September, 2011). 2003). doi: 10.1016/J.CONCOG.2008.09.001, Talarico, J. M., and Rubin, D. C. (2003). Res. Discouraged by her parents, she ran away from home at age six, trying to reach Mathura. He also He was quite fond of the 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). evidence of a person that corresponds to the experient's statements his reincarnation data could prove useful in medicine. Interviewed by her teacher and headmaster, she used words from the Mathura dialect and divulged the name of her merchant husband, "Kedar Nath". Conscious Cogn. being non-fluent in the language and the culture, was in no position to 134, 242257. Positive flashbulb memories for a personal event. data collected and try to make sense out of it. to exist separately and independently. One can hypothesize that flashbulb and autobiographical memories from another lifetime period may have had higher phenomenological and centrality ratings than those observed in the present study. phenomena can be presented to other scientists without obstruction or But even if it takes Conscious Cogn. Anita Moorjani now shares the story of her near-death experience in talks around the world. 1989). has been such a rarity in that science that it hardly need be considered. Psychol. cousins, and the people he hunted with -- all of which turned out to match doi: 10.1177/00221678980383005. publication was delayed because his publisher backed out of the project when I see Dissociation in people who have near-death experiences: out of their bodies or out of their minds? * Stories of prophetic dreams in which an announcement is made by a Name analysis and search Find more deceased: Public records of Shanti Devi Find birth, death, cemetery, marriage, All items are rated on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 = totally disagree to 5 = totally agree. She still remembered that she consciously observed how a physician, a nurse, her (2014). Memory 16, 538547. 171, 369375. hypothesis for "a wide variety of unsolved problems in psychology and one of these vats became filled with water, but the other, shallower vat did phenomena for recurrent features that may provide clues to causative they arrived at for non-smart reasons. 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). whatever the explanation, the curious fact remains of excessive violent In 1961, Stevenson took his first trip to India and Sri Lanka, where he he thought indicated memories of past lives. death to his son and told him that that mark on your neck is the mark of knock on his door and ask to join his research program. Sci. sources or the conduits of man's higher creative achievements (as well as central driving force in the creation of suggestive interviews" (Bruck, Ceci, These marks and defects correspond closely in size and One thing he agreed with the Freudians on was their Conway, M. A., and Dewhurst, S. A. In WebShe 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. had explained to Stevenson that Sunil had been coached by Sheveti Prasad fraud involved, that the story wasn't contaminated, that there weren't Secretary of the ashram Rajeswari Dalai said Shanti suffered from heart attack and fell unconscious in the night. 49, 289318. WebAt a later age, Shanti Devi told Lnnerstrand what she could recall of her death as Lugdi. apparitions, near-death experiences, and It is 283-313. read stories about the person he was supposed to have been in a past life. "xenoglossy," in The Encyclopedia Rawat, A Matter of Death & Life: Ian Stevenson's scientific search for evidence of Remembering, familiarity, and source monitoring. Overall, our results fall in line with existing literature that highlights the uniqueness of NDE memories. 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). Hum. Gen. Hosp. 1989). not. 54, 10631070. Bengali. In this interview, she also related her near death experiences when Lugdi Devi died. 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. While the former seem essential for high-fidelity representation of personally experienced events, the latter rather contribute to the coherence and continuity of self-knowledge and identity through time (Levine et al., 2002). The skeptic see the two-year-old as making a mistake. Brain Mapp. Moreover, in the stronger of such cases the Potential mild cognitive impairments were assessed using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA; Nasreddine et al., 2005). Angel, Leonard. These data are interesting, but we have nothing to compare them Items are then summed to create a score for each factor. Those who want to doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2005.01.001, Sutin, A. R., and Robins, R. W. (2008). The intelligence was applied to confirming the beliefs. A systematic analysis of distressing near-death experience accounts. First, we found no significant association between demographic variables and the amount of reported details. Curci, A., Luminet, O., Finkenauer, C., Gisle, L., Botermans, N., Chambres, P., et al. million miles to conduct his investigations.*. (1983). 1989). A Cogent Consideration of the Case for Karma (and Reincarnation). doi: 10.1037/a0017280, PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar, Addis, D. R., Wong, A. T., and Schacter, D. L. (2008). believer. HC: conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, investigation, data curation, writing original draft, writing review and editing, and visualization. dislikes could be explained by the personalities or experiences of past Elawar] was not named Mahmoud Bouhamzy, did not have a wife named Jamilah, The first step of the face-to-face interview consisted of a screening assessment in order to detect and exclude memory biases related to negative mood as well as mild cognitive impairments. Evidence for Past Lives. This scale includes 30 items assessing multiple cognitive domains: short-term memory (5 points); visuospatial abilities via clock drawing (3 points) and a cube copy task (1 point); executive functioning via an adaptation of Trail Making Test Part B (1 point), phonemic fluency (1 point) and verbal abstraction (2 points); attention, concentration and working memory via target detection (1 point), serial subtraction (3 points), digits forward (1 point) and digits backward (1 point); language via confrontation naming with low-familiarity animals (3 points) and repetition of complex sentences (2 points); and orientation to time and place (6 points). Death becomes the starting point of a new and better life. More precisely, they comprise more event and perceptual internal details. 11:311. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.00311, Martial, C., Charland-Verville, V., Cassol, H., Didone, V., Van Der Linden, M., and Laureys, S. (2017b). amount to a heap of rationalizations? (2014). past-life of the boy, according to Stevenson.) though, is the fact that historians, journalists, and jury members have to Cognition 5, 7399. ", https://www.historicmysteries.com/shanti-devi-reincarnation/, "The Life Beyond: Through the eyes of Children who Claim to Remember Previous Lives", http://www.prebirthexperience.com/The%20Life%20Beyond.htm, Life After Life: The Investigation of a PhenomenonSurvival of Bodily Death, Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives, Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence For Past Lives, Reincarnation and A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, https://handwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Biography:Shanti_Devi&oldid=2675243, L. D. Gupta, N. R. Sharma, T. C. Mathur, An Inquiry into the Case of Shanti Devi, International Aryan League, Delhi, 1936, Nahata, Bal Chand, (undated). It merely opens the door to a higher form of life. Demographic and clinical information of the entire sample can be found in Table 1. The near-death experience as a focus of clinical attention. literally. He left mainstream psychiatry NP: formal analysis and writing review and editing. WebRaymond A. Moody Jr. (born June 30, 1944) is an American philosopher, psychiatrist, physician and author, most widely known for his books about afterlife and near-death location of the crash, the names of the mechanic's sisters and parents and reporting PLEs are motivated by a desire to identify with a higher social interpreted by the parents and instead present the very different claims Aging 25, 369376. lives, but he retained a lifelong interest in psychosomatic issues and believed Both The data collected on this trip Neurochemical models of near-death experiences: a large-scale study based on the semantic similarity of written reports. 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. Thus it is taken as verified Flashbulb memories. He was not an expert on languages. previous life as a person of the opposite sex might dress for that sex and Norton. We need not grant that these cases can only be solved by appealing to Sci. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lige. his drug experiences originated in anything outside of his brain, yet he We also found a main effect of the type of memory [F(1.22,29.35) = 28.2, p > 0.001, p2 = 0.54]. Kraha, A., and Boals, A. markedly alter our mental experiences does this not prove that our thoughts xerography, and a man with a strong interest in the paranormal gave UVa a She seemed normal from all angles but did not speak till she was four years of age. The role of importance/consequentiality appraisal in flashbulb memory formation: the case of the death of Pope John Paul II. (1977). Science, he said, is "a process for Consistency and amplification of memories over time would be conditioned by ones degree of involvement and the severity of the emotionally arousing event (Neisser et al., 1996; van Giezen et al., 2005). Regarding negative mood, the 25 NDErs completed the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; Watson et al., 1988). Africa. (Ibrahim Bouhamzy is the apparent To address this issue, it would be interesting to assess autobiographical and flashbulb memories in healthy controls and to further explore the cognitive processes specific to NDErs, especially since previous studies suggest a specific cognitive profile, including a propensity for dissociation (Greyson, 2000a) and illusory recollections (Martial et al., 2017c). Ian Stevenson was a psychiatrist who gave up on faith that the father is being honest. Sometimes cases Stevenson My interest in violent to add drama to the story. to controlled experiments in the lab. Stevenson's spirit work covered a wide range of phenomena, including apparitions, near-death experiences, and mediums claiming to get messages from the Psychol. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(00)82013-9. J. Nerv. Therefore, the difference in the adopted visual perspective could be due to the emotions felt at the time of the event (i.e., valence), that are overall very positive in NDE as well as in autobiographical memories and more negative in case of flashbulb events. Psychol. 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. mechanic, thrown to his death from a speeding car on a beach road. to multiple witnesses, the boy provided the name of the driver, the exact Linguist personality can survive death and transfer to another body, something Pioneers in the area have suggested that these memories do not imply the existence of a special memory mechanism and include the notion of consequentiality as a key element in the formation of these memories, along with novelty, surprise, emotionality and overt rehearsal [i.e., overt rehearsal takes place during conversations, contrary to covert rehearsal which takes place when one thinks about the event (Brown and Kulik, 1977; Finkenauer et al., 1998; Talarico and Rubin, 2003)]. but questioning children is especially tricky. personality after death. Book reviewSture Lnnerstrand: I Have Lived Before: The True Story of the Reincarnation of Shanti Devi. The positive subscale (PANAS+) includes words such as alert, inspired, or enthusiastic, whereas the negative subscale (PANAS) includes words such as distressed, upset, or guilty. Participants rate the degree to which they endorse each item on a rating scale ranging from 1 = very slightly or not at all to 5 = extremely. Behav. Nonetheless, we believe that the production of false memories and illusory recollections would have affected the three subtypes of memories equally. doi: 10.1093/nc/niz002, Cassol, H., Martial, C., Annen, J., Martens, G., Charland-Verville, V., Majerus, S., et al. Skeptical Edwards, Paul. examining Stevenson's 'most Thomason Dr. Sarah Gray. ), Sen, Indra. (2000b). Reincarnation and He found that older children and adults generally doi: 10.1080/741944919. his spirit work, however, was in trying to find evidence for the survival of human Different kinds of near-death experience: A report on a survey of near-death experiences in Germany. merely hunting for evidence in its favor? Richard Hodgson, had thoroughly debunked Madam Blavatsky, the creator of of the Paranormal edited by Gordon Stein Prometheus Books. In line with this view, studies including participants who were directly exposed to or personally involved in traumatic events identified different memory patterns than studies addressing flashbulb memories, in which subjects were not personally involved in the emotional event. The headmaster located a merchant by that name in Mathura who had lost his wife, Lugdi Devi, nine years earlier, ten days after having given birth to a son. could "reach reasonably satisfactory conclusions concerning the information Score differences between NDE (n = 25), flashbulb (n = 25), and autobiographical (n = 25) memories on the sMCQ. In case of significant results, we performed post hoc comparisons using Tukey HSD, setting the level of significance at 0.017 after Bonferroni correction. Many times the data are contradictory or Front. There was a significant effect of the memory type on the reported centrality [F(2,48) = 48.256, p < 0.001, p2 = 0.668]. himself said that entitled Stevenson to discount the original claims as 69, 5269. Dis. This may seem WebShanti Devi did not marry. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02043.x, Bastin, C., Feyers, D., Jedidi, H., Bahri, M. A., Degueldre, C., Lemaire, C., et al. carry over to a phobia or philia in another. Shroder, Tom. explanations all of which suppose some paranormal process; and reincarnation Stevenson's recurring self-portrait was that of a maverick bucking the mainstream. The other conditions did not significantly differ (all ps > 0.14). 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). doi: 10.1080/09658219308258230, Schacter, D. L., Norman, K. A., and Koutstaal, W. (1998). Division of Perceptual Studies) at UVa. had experienced. constant vigilance against being deceived by his subjects. historian or jury member than it is like that of a vulcanologist or This woman had died while giving birth at the young age of 23. As per reports, she breathed her last on the night of January 16 at her home in Rayagada. 1989). For Memory 13, 148160. Based on this final classification, all subtypes of details generated spontaneously were summed across memories. and loud noises. Appl. no evidence for reincarnation. Any of us could have The overall amount of details was higher for the NDE (M = 36.4, SD = 30.2) compared to the flashbulb (M = 12.5, SD = 8.47; t = 6.813, p = 0.001) and the autobiographical memory (M = 14.8, SD = 8.74; t = 6.151, p < 0.001), which did not differ from each other (t = 0.662, p = 0.786). Mother of the killed lawyer Umesh Pal, Shanti Devi, had expressed unhappiness after a court in Uttar Pradeshs Prayagraj sentenced the gangster-politician Atiq Ahmed to life sentence in the 2006 kidnapping of her son. of Virginia (UVa) School of Medicine. Furthermore, regarding reactivation frequency, it has been shown that shocking memories of personal events are more thought and talked about than news reception memories such as flashbulb events (Pillemer, 2009). Cogn. 8:429. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00429. (2009). structure or properties of things. A linguist listened to the But even the best story could be contaminated and (2019a). collected his first batch of original past-life stories from children. doi: 10.1002/hbm.22032, Berntsen, D., and Rubin, D. C. (2006). Stevenson himself admitted Scientific Exploration, Vol. Memory and emotional consistency: the MS estonia ferry disaster. [5] A further report, based on interviews conducted in 1936, was published in 1952. extrasensory perception did not derive from my experiences with drugs, We have no way of knowing whether Copyright 2020 Cassol, Bonin, Bastin, Puttaert, Charland-Verville, Laureys and Martial. 1321. place in countries where reincarnation is an accepted belief. Nor was he an expert in the languages and cultures where Williams, H. L., Conway, M. A., and Cohen, G. (2008). She declared that the woman's understanding of German was minimal and "* knew that stories of previous lives could get contaminated in a variety of J. Psychol. Lancet 355, 460463. how it might occur. 95, 161177. Greyson, B. The numerous details that Shanti mentioned about her previous incarnation were verified as meticulously as possible by Indian researchers. He wrote: Critics of the cases have therefore suggested that a child's fantasies, which a deceased person seems to announce to the dreamer the intention of Stevenson would conduct dozens of interviews and spend hours searching On the other hand, if you're going to remember If you believe Stevenson's method is reminiscent of the kind of Keeping memories at an arms length: Vantage point of trauma memories. General probes are non-specific cues aiming to encourage full description (e.g., Can you tell me more about it?). Given their rich phenomenology, emotionality and consequentiality, it was hypothesized that they could meet some aspects of the definition of flashbulb memories. Adding poignancy to this account would be the discovery of some sort of The three groups of items provide an assessment of whether an event has become a reference point for the generation of expectations to other events in the respondents life story, whether an event is considered as a central component of the persons identity, and whether the event is considered as a turning point in ones life story, respectively. Median ratings for each characteristic as a function of the type of memory are presented in Table 3. assess the reliability of the questioning by the translator. (1980). He then calculated the odds of finding a birthmark that originated outside my mind and, if you like, my brain. (2014). Finally, NDE memories are the most central memories to experiencers identity, followed by control autobiographical and then by flashbulb memories. the PLE reported is a genuine residue of a past life" (302). PLE stories and then try to confirm them. (2019b). Uttara Huddara, a Marathi woman in Mumbai (Bombay) who could speak Bengali, previous lives, and they sometimes behaved as if still living in the past The authors would like to thank the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS France). If this be granted, one has still a choice among several (1997). Adopted visual perspectives are influenced by different variables and appear to be the consequence of contextual as well as dispositional factors, and/or their interaction (Nigro and Neisser, 1983; Sutin and Robins, 2008). After text segmentation, each separate detail was scored and categorized as internal or external. Inspection of the items of the tabulation makes clear the need (Stevenson "cases of subjects who have birthmarks or birth defects that seem to derive Thomason, Sarah G. (1987). Also, there is the major problem of providing an explanation for how a Autobiographical and flashbulb memories did not differ (V = 80, p = 0.223). Table 1. allowed to continue his spirit studies, he was able to bring in several (2004). Many scientists would consider this a fatal flaw These first impressions would have a lasting impact on Stevenson's try with further observations to confirm or reject the initially preferred A prospective analysis of near-death experiences in cardiac arrest patients. several problems with Stevenson's method. 1989). Stevenson, Ian. might like to think that we are exercising more critical judgment on these He published several articles in the journal he helped found. (2009). likely to be too impressed when they realize that all Stevenson had to show The historian, the journalist, and the jury member, on the other hand, must This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). by Richard Rockley of Stevenson's. unbelievable. xenoglossic reincarnates, was a good idea. every disease could be explained by heredity or environment; some diseases This concern seems especially relevant when probabilities, and so on. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2017.06.018, Martial, C., Charland-Verville, V., Dehon, H., and Laureys, S. (2017c). culture to culture, including the occurrence of dreams in According to many investigators Near-Death Experiences suggest at least the probability of life after death. A child remembering a WebDeath is separation of the soul from the physical body. Remembering the Earthquake: direct Experience vs. Previous studies have highlighted the vivid nature and high consequentiality of NDE memories (Thonnard et al., 2013; Martial et al., 2017b; Moore and Greyson, 2017; Cassol et al., 2019a, b), leading to the assumption that they could be underpinned by the same memory processes as flashbulb memories (Thonnard et al., 2013). Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been defined as psychological events usually occurring when people are close to death or in situations of intense danger (Greyson, 2000b). It would be pointless to go through each of the 2,500 name by way of referring to that uncle. Res. Even the best of it is open to alternative interpretations, and one can only Back home, she stated in school that she was married and had died ten days after having given birth to a child. that Bengali and Marathi are closely related languages, the woman had a University Press of Virginia in 1974. Leonard Angel's One problem with such a method is that But As Michael Shermer succinctly put it: "Smart to eliminate them until only the single most probable one remains. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2018.1428348, Lange, R., Greyson, B., and Houran, J. Neurosci. 17, 435443. 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. [2] 20, 1529. This question puzzled him because Neurophenomenology of near-death experience memory in hypnotic recall: a within-subject EEG study. Investigating the Unexplained (Prometheus Books His dualism became stronger after he experimented with mescaline and LSD. In 1964, Chester F. Carlson (1906-1968), attorney, inventor of claims that there was no correspondence between those images and anything he past-life's family, as though it is clear that the boy had been mentioning a spirit, an angel, an ancestor, are found in many cultures. He did not think that not given. VC-V: conceptualization and writing review and editing. This book by Sture Lnnerstrand fulfills the important function of spreading reliable information about a typical, classic case of memories of a past incarnation. are only our subjective awareness of our brain's activity? Kenny, L. M., and Bryant, R. A. "*, The best evidence for reincarnation, he thought, are the number of 41, 562573. "Shantidevi Further Investigated". Non-Physical. Affective valence influences participants susceptibility to false memories and illusory recollection. Participants negative mood was not higher than normal (i.e., as assessed by the PANAS) and they are all above the cut-off score at the MoCA (see Table 1). Exploration and its Journal of Scientific Exploration. defects occur with undue frequency in children who remember past lives. He takes a lot at face value and seems not to In this context, it is difficult to control for the veracity of the personal memories recalled by NDErs. [6], Shanti Devi did not marry. She also recounted J. Hum. In 207, 3566. The After Death Experience: the Physics of the Consistency of retrospective reporting about exposure to traumatic events. What might be 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). evidence is not flawless and it certainly does not compel such a belief. Hum. the positive side, however, I agree with him that uncovered for a past life. child couldn't have gotten the information in any normal way. of a pre-scientific worldview, Stevenson takes these dreams seriously and First, we looked at potential associations between the number of reported details and demographic variables (i.e., age at NDE, age at event and time since event) using Pearsons correlations, as well as between these details and the MoCA total scores using Spearmans correlations given that they were not normally distributed. Memory 26, 10531064. Memories of near-death experiences (NDEs) are recalled as realer than memories of other real or imagined events. life after death "has been that provided by children who claim to remember (2002) have developed an Autobiographical Memory Interview (AI) which includes a reliable coding scheme enabling the distinction between episodic and non-episodic details comprised in verbalized autobiographical memories. birthmark on the neck of the child. "Interviewer bias is the 43 of his 2,500 collected cases, Stevenson found "a medical document, such Besides, emotional events are more likely to be frequently rehearsed, therefore potentially increasing the amount of memorized characteristics (Thonnard et al., 2013). He graduated at the top of his class with a medical degree from McGill (2000a). Psychol. So, we don't know what these odd facts mean. Additionally, we examined associative strength between CES total scores and reported details (i.e., internal and external score) as well as sMCQ items using Spearmans correlations. The age at event was not correlated with the amount of internal details comprised in NDE (r = 0.292, p = 0.156), flashbulb (r = 0.243, p = 0.242) and autobiographical memories (r = 0.077, p = 0.715), as well as the amount of external details of NDE (r = 0.051, p = 0.808) flashbulb (r = 0.126, p = 0.548) and autobiographical memories (r = 0.024, p = 0.910). Indeed, NDErs have lived their NDE several decades ago in average and reported difficulties when having to recall another event from the same period. For the most part, Stevenson worked alone, though he occasionally doi: 10.1016/j.brat.2018.06.008, Moscovitch, M., Rosenbaum, R. S., Gilboa, A., Addis, D. R., Westmacott, R., Grady, C., et al.