Memory: recall, fantasy and religious claims.

This would seem to be quite an important piece of research, particularly as it has implications for so-called evidence for reincarnation, alien abduction etc.

people who commonly make source-monitoring errors respond to and imagine experiences more strongly than the average person, and they also tend to be more creative.
"It might be harder to discriminate between a vivid image that you'd generated yourself and the memory of a perception of something you actually saw," he said in a telephone interview. Peters also found in his study, detailed in the March issue of Consciousness and Cognition, that people with implausible memories are also more likely to be depressed and to experience sleep problems, and this could also make them more prone to memory mistakes. And once people make this kind of mistake, they might be inclined to stick to their guns for spiritual reasons, McNally said. "It may be a variant expression of certain religious impulses," he said. "We suspect that this might be kind of a psychological buffering mechanism against the fear of death."

Of course, we are also going to have to work out how it affects the apologetics relating to the resurrection. I suspect not a huge amount because of the way that in principle it adds nothing new to the panoply of objections and the kind of 'forensic' workover that the likes of Josh McDowell, Nicky Gumbal and Frank Morrison have given it. But I may be wrong.
FOXNews.com - Study: People Who Recall Past Lives, Alien Abduction Prone to Memory Errors - Science News | Current Articles

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