A New Approach to Collecting Children’s Statements Concerning Their Prenatal and Perinatal Memories

Abstract

The pioneering research by Dr. Ian Stevenson of children claiming to have past-life memories has been developed by other researchers to include children with other types of “anomalous” memories such as life-between-life, womb, or birth memories. These memories are called prenatal and perinatal memories here. A potential problem of these studies is that the records of these memories typically are often made long after the cases came to be known by the investigators, so that we cannot completely exclude the possibility that these memories are imposed or inspired by family members of the children. This can be a serious weakness of the evidential value of these data in view of the fact that the suggestibility of pre-school children has been experimentally proven to be high. To overcome this weakness, I would like to propose a method of recording children’s initial remarks of prenatal and perinatal memories without any intervention by investigators.