Feelings of past lives as expected perturbations within the neurocognitive processes that generate the sense of self: contributions from limbic lability and vectorial hemisphericity.

Normal, young men and women who believed they may have lived a previous life (n = 21) or who did not endorse (n = 52) this belief of "reincarnation" were exposed to partial sensory deprivation and received transcerebral stimulation by burst-firing magnetic fields over either the left or right hemisphere. Individuals who reported belief in reincarnation could be discriminated from nonbelievers by their more frequent report of experiences of tingling sensations, spinning, detachment of consciousness from the body, and intrusions of thoughts that were not attributed to the sense of self. The results support the hypothesis that there may be neurocognitive processes which identify experiences as originating from the sense of self (episodic or autobiographical memory) or "not self." When anomalous experiences are beyond the boundary of the experiences contained with the generalization gradient of concurrent autobiographical memory, they are more likely to be attributed to culturally available default explanations such as living a previous life.