6. SUBLIMINAL AWARENESS AND MEMORIES FROM PREVIOUS LIVES

Antonio Damasio’s description of patients who show a characteristic electrodermal response although they are unable consciously to recognize familiar faces struck a chord with the Dalai Lama. He compares this, and cases of unexplained affinity for strangers, with the experience of memories surfacing from previous lifetimes.

DALAI LAMA: I think many, if not all of us, have experienced occasions when we meet another person for the first time in this lifetime, and we feel some sense of familiarity, or affinity, with that person. This seems to be a commonplace experience. We may meet another person for the first time and there is no such spontaneous, subjective experience of affinity. In the case of spontaneous affinity experienced on a first encounter, will there be comparable changes in galvanic skin response?

ANTONIO DAMASIO: An excellent point, indeed. This is what we call “mistaken identity” in our research protocols. When we make a mistake in recognition, feeling somehow that we know this person, and in fact it turns out that we actually don’t, there is indeed a galvanic skin response exactly like that in valid familiar recognition. This accounts for about 10 percent of all experiences we have when encountering unfamiliar faces. In fact, from the point of view of conscious experience, some of those responses coincide with a feeling of familiarity, and the subject often says something such as: “That’s very much like so-and-so, but not quite,” or, “That reminds me of….” Or they say, “I have the feeling that I know this person, but I believe it is not true.” Or, “I really do not know this person although I have a vague sense of familiarity.”

DALAI LAMA: Buddhism, of course, asserts the existence of former and later lives. The way this is understood from a Buddhist perspective is that during one’s experience in past lives one meets individuals and these meetings place imprints on one’s stream of consciousness. The stream of consciousness is then carried over into this lifetime. There is therefore a subliminal affinity.

LARRY SQUIRE: The neuroscience perspective would be that our memories are relatively imperfect, so that when we encounter a person and believe that there may be a sense of familiarity, we are experiencing some correspondence and possibly some confusion with many other faces that we have encountered in this lifetime.

Indeed, there is a phenomenon in aging individuals that we refer to as “generalization of faces,” where faces become increasingly familiar. It produces a feeling of familiarity with more faces than when one was younger because we have had so many experiences with faces. Perhaps our mechanisms for facial analysis are not quite as sharp as formerly. This would make us wonder how, if the memory is retained from a previous life, this sense of familiarity is encountered more frequently in later years when you might expect the retained memories to have diminished.

ANTONIO DAMASIO: Our evidence does not speak to the point made by His Holiness. Our evidence speaks simply to the fact that such misidentifications do exist. And we attempt to explain them on the basis of the correspondence that certain facial features do have. For instance, with an image that one responds to with a sense of familiarity but which does not correspond to a truly familiar identity, that face tends to share certain characteristics in terms of physiognomy with other faces, or with a “target” face.

As the discussion continued, Lewis Judd mentioned two other conditions that might have some bearing on the experience of past life memories: the déjà vu phenomenon and a mental disorder called Capgras syndrome, which is characterized by a subjective certainty that a familiar person has been replaced by an identical double. Here, His Holiness comes back to the subject.

DALAI LAMA: You have the case of a person who, because of a stroke in a particular area of the cortex, can’t recognize familiar faces. But even without conscious recognition of that person, there is a change in the electrical skin response equivalent to responses in instances of familiar conscious recognition.

I would like to continue along the same line of thought, but not concerning whether you have a recollection of another person, or whether your memory is impaired. Rather, I would like to address the question of your sense of affinity, closeness, or attraction to an object, such as a flower or dog. In some cases we may look at a dog and feel an attraction to it. Here it is not a question of whether you had met the dog before or not, but simply whether you feel an attraction, which in Buddhist understanding is due to familiarity or habituation from the past. Is this subjective sense of affinity accompanied by the electrical skin response that we discussed?

ANTONIO DAMASIO: Yes, it is. It is more difficult to study those skin responses when you do not have unique stimuli, because you have many more confounding factors. But you can do it. Your sense of affinity toward an object, even if it is not an object you have ever encountered before and therefore is a novel object, can still be explained from the Western neuroscientific point of view, as the result of previous memory stores from this lifetime. You will probably experience affinity in respect to certain categories of objects, for instance, certain flowers, certain people, certain landscapes, because these particular objects elicit affective memory responses in your brain and body. That agreeable state can be described in terms of emotional response, in terms of affect. But the affective memories are evoked in your brain because the objects bring to mind (unconsciously perhaps more so than consciously) previous pleasant experiences with similar objects or classes of objects. I should point out that emotions and affect are bodily states that result from brain responses that may involve unconscious as well as conscious experiences.

For instance, in our model, a positive or negative emotion can be referenced to a change in the state of a particular region of the body. In other words, we have states of the body that correspond with happiness. This is distinct from states of the body that correspond to sadness, anxiety, anguish, or anger. So emotions in the Western view can be seen as the consciousness induced by specific brain states as accompanied by perceptions of a variety of body responses to these states.

I think of human beings as brains with large bodies on their backs. Each brain carries its body all the time, a bit like a snail carries its shell. We are more or less aware of carrying this body with us all the time. This neuroscience view is different from the commonplace view of consciousness accompanying pari passu perceptions of “the world out there.” In effect, we tend to think of ourselves as looking out into the world through the telescopic system of an eye, listening through a near-trumpet of a cochlea in the ear, and feeling the palpable world through a glovelike skin, and so forth. The neuroscience view considers that the brain and consciousness are self-organizing, self-activating systems which are central to all experience. The body is a carapace, as it were. The outside world and body are represented in brain.

ALLAN HOBSON: I wanted to clarify two points. I think that the Dalai Lama was interested in the face recognition question. I wanted to be sure that we all understood exactly what the implications of that are.

It seems to me that his interest concerns responses to faces that seem to be familiar, but in fact have not been encountered previously in this lifetime. I could phrase his question in this way: Could this technique be used to help decide whether or not there are representations in our brains of people whom we may have met in previous lives?

I think that’s the question His Holiness would like to answer. I’m not sure whether you could do anything with that. But suppose we took pictures of everyone here. Then we could expose them to the 15th Dalai Lama at some future time and see whether he could tell the difference, by conscious recognition and/or by galvanic skin response, between people that the 14th Dalai Lama had seen and people that he had not. There is probably a way to establish whether the number of recognitions is greater than the ten percent that you ascribe to mistaken recognition due to similarities of facial physiognomy.

ANTONIO DAMASIO: I think, first off, that we earnestly hope it will take a long time for such an experiment to be feasible.

ROBERT LIVINGSTON: And therefore, that we should have repeated reinforcement of the Dalai Lama’s experience witnessing our faces over those intervening years!

DALAI LAMA: There are instances where small children recollect their past life very vividly.

ALLAN HOBSON: But what is the evidence that they have recollected correctly and accurately? There must be solid, quantitative, documentary evidence, not simply testimony.

DALAI LAMA: There are specific recent instances in which two girls in India recollected the names of people that they had known in previous lives. They knew the geography and the geographical names. They could recollect their home village of their previous life and call it by name. They also recognized textbooks used in their studies in a previous life, but they couldn’t even read the texts in their present lives.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: How old were they?

DALAI LAMA: Four or five.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: They could have talked to practically anyone in the meantime who could have told them stories of the region and the people.

DALAI LAMA: In this case, both girls now have four parents each. Because their memory is so clear, so convincing, the previous two parents now accept each of them as being also their own child. It was a case where the children recollected people and places precisely from their previous lives—places they had never been to, where their parents had never taken them, nor had their parents told them about them. It was totally out of their experience in the five years of their lifetime. They were able to recognize books that they were very fond of in their previous life. Although they couldn’t even read, they were specifically attracted to those particular books.

ANTONIO DAMASIO: A positive response.

DALAI LAMA: I remembered this case because one of the two girls had died in an accident with one part of her brain damaged. I myself, as a Buddhist, can’t find an explanation for that small girl. You see, she recognized her previous parents very clearly, and also recognized her own previous books. Yet she cannot read. From the Buddhist viewpoint, this is very difficult to explain.

ANTONIO DAMASIO: So she was taken by people to the place where she lived in her previous life?

DALAI LAMA: That’s right.

ANTONIO DAMASIO: And in her previous life she had the accident?

DALAI LAMA: Yes. She was only about fifteen or sixteen when she died in the previous life. The present parents, when they first detected these peculiarities, ignored the issue. The girl said this is not my place, my place is somewhere else which has a different name. The parents of this life didn’t take it seriously. They thought she was simply fantasizing. But she insisted continuously. One day, her father told her, “Yes! All right, now show me.” The small girl took her father very quietly a few miles away, to her previous home.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: It does raise the question of why it doesn’t happen more often. If all of us are thought to have souls that come from other lives, then the problem is why each of us does not recollect in great detail an earlier life. I quite honestly don’t have any beliefs about my earlier life.

ANTONIO DAMASIO: That’s exactly what I was thinking. Why doesn’t it happen more often? What kind of education was that girl subject to? Was there anything special in that girl’s upbringing that would have made that more likely?

DALAI LAMA: In this particular case, I don’t know how to explain it. In her previous life, she was an ordinary girl with no special training. Buddhism generally posits many different degrees of vividness of awareness. One important thing to note is that in her previous life, she had a healthy body but she met with a sudden death. So you see, when death occurs suddenly, if one is in perfect health, one’s memories still remain very sharp. From the Buddhist point of view, her recollection of her past life might have some relation to meditative experiences that were acquired in previous lifetimes. Ordinarily, it is difficult to remember one’s past life. Such recollections seem to be more vivid when the child is very young, such as two or three, and in some cases even younger.

LEWIS JUDD: Does that recollection attenuate as the child gets older and when they grow up? Does it disappear?

DALAI LAMA: Yes. When the present body is fully formed, the ability to recall past life seems to diminish.

LEWIS JUDD: What would the explanation for that be?

DALAI LAMA: Simply the dependence of the mind upon this body. The mental associations with this life become increasingly dominant. There is a close relationship during the first few years of one’s life with the continuum of consciousness from the previous life. But as experiences of this life become more developed and elaborate, they dominate.

It is also possible within this lifetime to enhance the power of the mind, enabling one to reaccess memories from previous lives. Such recollection tends to be more accessible during meditative experiences in the dream state. Once one has accessed memories of previous lives in the dream state, one gradually recalls them in the waking state.