What If Your Memories Aren’t All From This Life?
Written by Reese Maskwa, Entrepreneur
Reese Maskwa is an entrepreneur, visionary, and founder of Quanta-versity and Sacred Roots. Her ventures explore human potential, consciousness, business energetics, and quantum energetics, while creating transformational education and immersive travel experiences in Costa Rica, with a long-term vision for global expansion.
For decades, researchers have investigated children who describe lives they never lived, memories they shouldn't have, and physical marks that appear to correspond to people who died before they were born. So what happens when science starts asking the same questions spirituality has been asking for thousands of years?
What if the story you tell yourself about who you are isn't the whole story? What if some of the fears you carry, the relationships that feel strangely familiar, the places that seem to awaken something inside you, or even certain patterns you cannot explain have roots that reach further back than this lifetime?
For most of my life, those questions haven't been theoretical. I was talking about past lives as a child, long before I understood what reincarnation was supposed to mean. I would tell my parents about a life before this one and talk about experiences that, from my perspective, were memories. I wasn't trying to be mystical. I wasn't trying to convince anyone of anything. I was a child describing what I knew, and understandably, my parents had absolutely no idea what to do with it. I probably drove them a little crazy.
As I grew older, those experiences became something I couldn't easily categorize. Eventually, my curiosity about consciousness became much more intentional. After a debilitating car accident changed my life, I began studying neuroscience because I wanted to understand what had happened to me and what the human brain and body were actually capable of. I wanted to understand healing. I wanted to understand why some people recover from seemingly impossible circumstances and why others remain trapped in patterns that seem to have no obvious origin.
The further I went into neuroscience, however, the bigger the questions became. I found myself fascinated not only by the brain, but by consciousness itself. Where does consciousness come from? Is it entirely produced by the brain? What exactly is memory? Why do human beings experience intuition, déjà vu, dreams, profound connections, and altered states of consciousness? Perhaps most importantly, are we truly limited to what we can currently measure?
Those questions eventually led me far beyond what I had originally set out to study. They led me into consciousness, energy, spirituality, past lives, and what I now teach through my work in quantum energetics. But rather than making me less interested in science, the journey made me more interested in it. The more I learned, the more I realized that there are areas where science and spirituality are asking surprisingly similar questions, just using very different languages.
The question science couldn't quite ignore
Past lives are often dismissed as a spiritual belief, and certainly reincarnation has existed as a spiritual and religious concept for thousands of years. But something changes when the question isn't being asked by someone who already believes in reincarnation. It changes when a child of two starts telling their parents about another mother, another house, another name, another family, or another death, and when those statements can sometimes be investigated against historical records.
That is precisely what researchers at the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies have been doing for decades.
The scale of their work is remarkable. The University of Virginia reports that its researchers have collected more than 2,500 cases of the reincarnation type over approximately 60 years. The cases come from around the world, and most involve young children, commonly between the ages of two and five, who spontaneously report memories they believe belong to a previous life.
Researchers have documented cases in which children's statements correspond to the life and death of a deceased individual, as well as cases in which children display unusual phobias or preferences and cases involving birthmarks or birth defects that appear to correspond with wounds or marks associated with the deceased person.
The research is not hidden away in a collection of paranormal websites. Psychiatrist JimB. Tucker, who directs the Division of Perceptual Studies, published a 2025 review in the International Review of Psychiatry examining approximately six decades of this research. His review states that more than 2,500 cases have been investigated worldwide and notes that, in the strongest cases, children have provided details that proved strikingly accurate for an individual who lived in the past, sometimes at considerable geographical distance from the child's family.
That doesn't prove reincarnation. It does something arguably more interesting: it gives us a phenomenon that can be investigated. Once you begin looking at the research, the subject becomes much harder to reduce to a simple question of whether someone "believes" in past lives.
There is more research than most people realize
In 2021, researchers conducted a scoping review of the academic literature on claimed past life memories. They searched six major databases: Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed and the Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE), APA PsycINFO, the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), and OpenGrey. They initially identified 1,784 studies. After removing duplicates, irrelevant studies, and studies that did not meet their criteria, the researchers arrived at 78 studies for their final review.
The results were striking: 84% of the studies involved children, 60% were case reports, 73% used interviews, and 50% included documentary analysis. Birthmarks or physical defects were investigated in 37% of the studies, while unusual behaviours were investigated in 74%.
The study, Academic Studies on Claimed Past Life Memories: A Scoping Review, is available through PubMed and ScienceDirect.
There is an important caveat here. Most of this research is observational. A large proportion consists of case reports rather than randomized controlled experiments, and the authors themselves call for better methodologies and more research across cultures. That means these studies cannot be treated as if they have demonstrated reincarnation in the same way that a controlled clinical trial might establish the efficacy of a medication.
But there is a difference between saying that evidence is not conclusive and saying that there is no evidence. There is evidence. There is a substantial body of it. The debate is about what the evidence means.
Why children’s memories make the question so difficult
One of the reasons these cases are so compelling is that many of them involve children who are not deliberately attempting to access a past life. They are not sitting in a regression session being asked to imagine who they were. They often begin speaking spontaneously.
University of Virginia (UVA) describes children, usually between two and five years old, who may talk about another family, another home, another occupation, or another death. The apparent memories generally fade as children grow older, often around the age of seven. Some children also demonstrate behaviours or phobias that researchers say are unusual within their current family circumstances.
This is particularly interesting to me because of my own childhood. I didn't have a framework for what I was experiencing. I wasn't thinking about the philosophical implications of reincarnation. I simply remembered things. Looking back now, I can see how easy it would have been for an adult to assume a child was imagining things, making up stories, or seeking attention. Perhaps that explanation is correct in some cases. Children absolutely have extraordinary imaginations.
But what happens when the child provides details that can be checked? What happens when researchers find a deceased person whose life corresponds with those statements? What happens when the child knows things that appear difficult to explain through ordinary exposure?
Those are the cases that have kept researchers investigating this phenomenon for decades.
The birthmarks that raise even more questions
Perhaps the most unusual part of the research involves something that cannot simply be explained as a story: the physical body.
According to UVA's database, approximately 30% of its cases contain a birthmark and/or birth defect. Researchers have reported cases in which these marks appear to correspond with wounds or identifying marks associated with the deceased individual the child claims to remember.
A 2023 systematic review published in Explore specifically investigated birthmarks and birth defects of the head and neck in cases involving alleged past life memories. Researchers searched MEDLINE/PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Excerpta Medica Database (EMBASE), and PsycINFO and identified six studies containing 19 cases. The lesions ranged from 0.5 to 12 centimetres, and nine of the cases included some form of verified official report. The researchers concluded that the existing literature was intriguing but also limited, emphasizing the need for additional high-quality primary research.
The full study, Birthmarks and Birth Defects in the Head and Neck Region and Claims of Past Life Memories: A Systematic Review, can be read through PubMed or ScienceDirect.
Ian Stevenson, the psychiatrist whose work formed much of the foundation for the University of Virginia's reincarnation research, devoted decades to investigating these types of cases. His two-volume work, Reincarnation and Biology, documented a much larger collection of birthmark and birth defect cases. A later analysis identified 75 head and neck cases in Stevenson's books and compared them with the 19 cases identified in the systematic review of journal literature.
Again, none of this gives us a simple laboratory demonstration of reincarnation. But it does create a fascinating problem.
If a child is born with a distinctive physical mark and later describes a previous person who supposedly died with an injury in the same location, what is the mechanism? Is it coincidence? Is it selection bias? Is it a psychological or developmental phenomenon? Is there information being transmitted through some ordinary mechanism that researchers have not identified? Or is there something else happening?
Those are very different possibilities, and science has not yet settled the question.
Now we have a new statistical question
One of the most fascinating developments is that researchers are beginning to move beyond individual stories and investigate patterns across large numbers of cases.
In August 2026, researchers from the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies published a large-scale analysis of 1,678 cases in which a deceased previous person had apparently been identified. The study examined what researchers call the "intermission time," the period between the reported death of the previous person and the birth of the child who later appeared to remember that life.
The researchers found a statistically significant relationship between characteristics of the reported death and the length of this interval. Median intervals decreased from approximately 21 months for the least unexpected deaths to 12 months for the most unexpected deaths, representing a reduction of approximately 40 to 45%. The association remained after the researchers examined several potential sources of bias, including verification quality, memory contamination, family association, social status motivation, and family beliefs about reincarnation.
That is a very strange finding, but it is also important not to overstate what it means. The researchers themselves describe the data as observational and call for further research into the underlying mechanism. The finding does not establish that a consciousness literally moved from one body to another.
But it does demonstrate something scientifically valuable: there may be patterns within these cases that can be statistically examined rather than merely described as stories.
You can read the research through the University of Virginia's publication page or the study's Digital Object Identifier (DOI) through the American Psychological Association.
That is the direction I find most exciting, not trying to force science to validate spirituality, but allowing unusual observations to generate hypotheses that can actually be tested.
What happens to these children when they grow up?
Another question researchers have only recently begun exploring is what happens to these children later in life.
In 2024, University of Virginia researchers published the first observational follow-up study of American adults who had originally been interviewed as children about alleged past life memories. The study included 23 adults. The researchers found that these individuals generally appeared to lead normal, productive lives and had high educational attainment compared with the general population. Sixty-five percent reported that the experiences had some impact on their lives, while relatively few reported negative effects.
The study is particularly interesting because it moves the conversation away from simply asking whether a child's statements were "real" and toward asking what these experiences actually do to a person's life. That matters because extraordinary experiences don't necessarily have to be pathological simply because they are difficult to explain.
A person can have an unusual experience and still live a completely ordinary, productive life. For me, that is an important distinction.
But what about memory?
This is where we have to slow down. If we're going to bridge spirituality and science honestly, we can't only present the evidence that supports our preferred interpretation. We also have to examine the explanations that challenge it.
Human memory is not a perfect recording system. Memories are reconstructed. They can be influenced by suggestion, emotion, context, and later information. This is particularly important when discussing adult past life regression.
Someone can undergo hypnosis or guided imagery and experience an incredibly vivid narrative about another lifetime. They might see a name, a place, a family, an occupation, or a death. The emotional experience can be profound, but an experience feeling real does not automatically establish that it is historically accurate.
That is why I see a significant difference between spontaneous childhood cases and adult regression experiences. The first may occur before a child has even developed a sophisticated understanding of reincarnation. The second can involve suggestion and expectation. They are both worthy of exploration, but they should not be treated as identical forms of evidence.
For me, this doesn't diminish the mystery. It makes the investigation more interesting. Perhaps some experiences are memories. Perhaps some are symbolic. Perhaps some are created by the brain. Perhaps some involve information acquired unconsciously. Perhaps some are coincidences. Perhaps there are experiences that current models of consciousness simply don't explain yet.
The bigger question is consciousness
Eventually, the conversation about past lives becomes a conversation about something much bigger: what consciousness actually is.
Modern neuroscience has given us extraordinary insight into the brain. We can observe neural activity, investigate memory, identify changes associated with perception, and study what happens when different areas of the brain are damaged or stimulated.
But despite everything we know, consciousness remains one of the great unanswered questions. We can describe increasingly sophisticated relationships between brain activity and conscious experience, but the deeper question remains: why does physical processing produce subjective experience at all?
Why does seeing something feel like something? Why does pain have an internal quality? Why do we experience ourselves as a continuous "I"? If consciousness is something we still don't completely understand while we are alive, how confident can we really be about what happens to it when the body dies?
That doesn't prove that consciousness survives death, but it does mean the question remains scientifically and philosophically alive.
Where science and spirituality begin to overlap
For thousands of years, spiritual traditions have proposed that consciousness is more than the physical body. Different cultures have developed different concepts to explain it: souls, reincarnation, ancestral consciousness, subtle bodies, spiritual realms, and countless other frameworks.
Science approaches the same territory differently. It asks what can be observed, measured, replicated, and falsified. These approaches don't have to be enemies.
In fact, I think the most fascinating conversations happen when we allow both to ask questions without pretending they have already answered them. Spirituality can offer hypotheses about meaning and consciousness. Science can test what can actually be tested and tell us what the evidence currently supports. Spiritual exploration can sometimes lead us toward questions science has not yet developed the tools to investigate.
The danger is when either side becomes absolutely certain. Science becomes limited when it assumes that what cannot currently be measured cannot possibly exist. Spirituality becomes limited when it assumes that a powerful personal experience automatically proves a particular explanation. The most interesting space is somewhere in between.
Maybe we are still discovering what human beings are capable of
This is ultimately what past lives have come to represent for me. Not simply the question of who I was before I was born, but the larger question of what human beings are capable of knowing, remembering, and experiencing.
My childhood experiences were the beginning of that question for me. My accident and my study of neuroscience gave me another doorway into it. My exploration of energy, consciousness, and spirituality gave me another.
The more I have explored, the more convinced I have become that we should be careful about placing a final boundary around human potential simply because we don't yet understand what lies beyond it. That doesn't mean believing everything. It means remaining willing to investigate.
Because if the research eventually demonstrates that past life memories have a conventional explanation, we will have learned something remarkable about memory and consciousness. If future research demonstrates that some cases cannot be explained through known mechanisms, that will be remarkable too.
If humanity eventually discovers that consciousness has capacities we have not yet imagined, the implications will be enormous. Either way, the investigation is worth having.
Then there is another place people have been looking for answers
This is where my own work takes the conversation into territory that is less established scientifically but deeply significant within spiritual traditions.
There is a concept known as the Akashic Records, often described as a kind of energetic or nonphysical record containing information about experiences, consciousness, and the journey of a soul.
The history of the concept itself is fascinating. The modern idea of the Akashic Records developed through Theosophical traditions and was influenced by concepts associated with the Sanskrit term akasha, as well as Western philosophy, religious ideas, and interpretations of physics. Religious studies scholar Alex Nash examined this history in the Central European Journal for Contemporary Religion, tracing how the concept developed into the modern idea of an ethereal archive containing information about the past.
You can read Nash's academic paper, The Akashic Records: Origins and Relation to Western Concepts, through the Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL) or EBSCOhost.
There is an important distinction here: academic research has examined the history and development of the Akashic Records concept, but there is not currently a body of controlled scientific research establishing the Akashic Records as a measurable information field. I don't think we need to pretend otherwise, because what I can speak about is my own experience.
Over the years, I have learned to work with what I understand as the Akashic Records, and I have used this process in sessions with other people. There have been countless moments when someone has sat in front of me and information has come through that I had no conscious way of knowing about them beforehand. Sometimes it has involved childhood experiences, family dynamics, personal events, or patterns that the person had never shared with me. I've watched people become completely stunned because the information was so specific and personal that they couldn't understand how I could possibly know it.
Those experiences are not laboratory proof of an Akashic field, and I don't claim that they are. They are firsthand experiences that have profoundly shaped my understanding of consciousness and information, and they are part of the reason I became so passionate about teaching other people how to explore this territory for themselves.
What fascinates me most is not asking someone to blindly believe that an Akashic Record exists. It is teaching them a technique for exploring consciousness and then allowing their own experience to become part of the investigation. That is the work I now teach through Quanta-Versity.
For me, the Akashic Records sit at the very edge of the larger conversation we've been having throughout this article: where does information come from, how much are we capable of accessing, and is consciousness more expansive than the models we currently have available to explain it?
I don't think we have all the answers, but I don't think we need to. The child who once drove her parents crazy talking about a life before this one never stopped asking the question. She simply grew up and learned how to ask it differently.
Perhaps that is what exploring past lives ultimately offers us. Not simply an opportunity to discover who we may have been, but an opportunity to question who we are now, why we are here, which patterns we are carrying, and how much of our potential remains unexplored.
Maybe your story began when you were born. Maybe it didn't. Maybe past lives are exactly what they appear to be. Maybe the explanation will turn out to be something entirely different.
But after more than 2,500 investigated cases, 78 academic studies identified in one major scoping review, decades of research into birthmarks and behavioural patterns, new statistical analysis of 1,678 cases, and a growing scientific interest in consciousness itself, I don't think the question deserves to be dismissed. I think it deserves to be explored.
Because perhaps the most extraordinary discovery isn't finding out who you were before.
Perhaps it's discovering what becomes possible when you finally understand who you are now. That is the question that has driven my work for years: what if we are capable of far more than we have ever been taught to believe?
Read more from Reese Maskwa
Reese Maskwa, Entrepreneur
Reese Maskwa's entrepreneurial journey grew from transforming her own life in ways she once believed were almost impossible and discovering just how capable humans can be. Through Quanta-Versity, she is reimagining education around consciousness, human potential, and the forces that shape our reality, while Sacred Roots brings education into the real world through immersive experiences in Costa Rica. Her vision is to create education that doesn't simply teach, but changes what people believe is possible. Her ultimate goal is to use education and experience as catalysts for personal and global transformation-and she believes we're only beginning to understand what humans are truly capable of.
