In 1952, in Pueblo, Colorado, a businessman named Morey Bernstein — an amateur hypnotist for whom this was only a hobby — invited a housewife in her twenties named Virginia Tighe to sit down on his sofa for an experiment in hypnotic regression. He took her back to childhood, and then further still, to “before you were born.”

What happened next silenced the room. Virginia began to speak with an Irish accent. She called herself Bridey Murphy, a young woman born in Cork, Ireland, in 1798. She described the wooden house she had lived in, a husband who was a lawyer, a move to Belfast, Irish songs and Irish dancing — with details an American housewife had no obvious way of knowing. The book that followed in 1956, The Search for Bridey Murphy, became a phenomenon of a bestseller. “Come as you were in your past life” parties sprang up across America, and the phrase “past life” entered Western popular culture in earnest for the first time.

Then reporters from the Chicago American went looking into Virginia’s childhood.

Across the street from the house where she grew up in Chicago, they found an Irish immigrant neighbour — her name was “Bridie Murphy Corkell.” They also found that Virginia had spoken with an Irish accent in amateur theatre as a teenager, and that many details of “Bridey’s life” matched things she had seen and heard in her own childhood. The essential point is that Virginia genuinely believed what she recounted under hypnosis — and that is the most interesting part of the whole story, because her brain did what every human brain can do: take fragments of memory whose source has been lost and weave them into a new narrative that feels more real than real.

Seventy years later, hypnotic regression remains an extremely popular technique — both age regression to “find the root” of a problem, and past-life regression to “heal” old karma. This article looks at what scientists have actually tested across those seventy years, what they found, and why what they found is the reason NBRH has decided not to use regression techniques in our work at all.

The short version, for readers in a hurry: hypnotic regression — both age regression and past-life regression — produces experiences that feel entirely real. But the research accumulated since the 1950s has pointed consistently in one direction. Adults taken back under hypnosis do not actually become children again; they behave according to their own picture of how a child is supposed to be. Hypnosis does not make memory more accurate; it increases confidence in memories that may have been wrong from the start. And the “past lives” people describe in trance shift clearly with whatever the hypnotist has led them to expect. The American Medical Association concluded as early as 1985 that memories obtained under hypnosis may be less reliable than ordinary recall — and even the most serious reincarnation researcher in the world rejected past-life regression as well. This is why NBRH does not use regression, and works instead with emotion, bodily sensation, and patterns of response occurring in the present, which require no accuracy of memory at all.

Why a regression experience feels so “real”

Before turning to the research, we should be fair to the feelings of anyone who has been through this — because the sense of realness during a regression truly did happen to them. Vivid memory, overwhelming emotion; some people weep, some tremble, and many leave the room feeling they have discovered something true about their life. Those feelings are not fake.

But feeling real and being accurate are two different things, and the gap between them comes from three factors memory science has understood for a long time.

The first is that human memory is not a video camera. It is reconstructed each time we recall it, assembled from fragments drawn from several sources, with the missing gaps filled in by what “probably” happened — without our noticing.

The second is cryptomnesia: remembering the content while losing the source. Just as Virginia remembered the Irish material but forgot she had heard it from a neighbour, the brain mislabels it as “my memory.” And “memories of a past life” work the same way.

The third is the nature of the hypnotic state itself. The American Medical Association described it as involving focused attention, heightened responsiveness to suggestion, and a temporary suspension of critical judgement — an excellent state for relaxation and for changing patterns of behaviour, and a very poor one for serving as a witness.

Age regression: an adult playing a child, not the child returning

The most basic question about regression is this: when an adult is hypnotised and taken back to “being six years old,” do they actually become six again?

Martin Orne, a leading hypnosis researcher, tested exactly that as early as 1951. He asked adults regressed to age six to draw and to write, then compared the results with work those same people had actually produced at six. The drawings made under hypnosis did look “childlike” — but they were childlike in the way an adult imagines a child draws. They carried adult complexity mixed in, and anachronisms no child of that age could have produced: difficult words spelled correctly, knowledge a child of that age did not yet have. Orne concluded that what occurs is a sincere enactment of a role by someone thoroughly absorbed in the experience of that role — not an actual return to childhood.

Some thirty years later, Michael Nash systematically reviewed everything that had tested the question and published it in Psychological Bulletin in 1987. Those studies covered every dimension — neural reactions, cognitive developmental level on Piagetian tasks, perception of visual illusions that children and adults see differently — and Nash’s conclusion was direct: there was no evidence that hypnotic regression returns mental or bodily functioning to a genuinely childlike state. The mental and physiological activity of regressed subjects remained fundamentally adult.

But the study we think speaks for all of them best is the one by Nash and colleagues using something small: the transitional object of childhood — a doll or a blanket. The researchers contacted the participants’ parents to confirm which object each child had been attached to, then regressed the participants under hypnosis to around age three and asked about it. The hypnotically regressed participants identified the object correctly significantly less often than the non-hypnotised control group — even though, during the session, their posture, expression and emotion looked far more “childlike.” This is the clearest possible picture of the gap between looking convincing and being correct.

Does hypnosis make memory more accurate?

If regression does not really take someone back to being a child in that moment, the next question is whether hypnosis at least helps to “retrieve” buried memories more accurately — since that is the central promise of every form of regression.

Medicine answered that in 1985. The AMA Council on Scientific Affairs reviewed the whole body of evidence and published in JAMA that memories obtained under hypnosis may involve confabulation and pseudomemory, and are not merely inaccurate but appear to be less reliable than recalling those same memories in an ordinary waking state.

Almost a decade later, Steblay and Bothwell conducted a meta-analysis of 24 studies comparing the memory of hypnotised and non-hypnotised witnesses. Their 1994 conclusion matched the AMA’s: hypnotised subjects introduced more errors into recall, showed higher levels of pseudomemory, and — most dangerous of all — had greater confidence in their own accuracy, even though those memories were not accurate at all. Put simply, hypnosis does not reveal a genuine past experience; it merely strengthens the feeling that what was seen in trance is true. And confidence unsupported by accuracy is the most dangerous combination in memory.

The consequences of this body of evidence reached as far as the courtroom. Many courts in the United States came to restrict or refuse testimony that had been “refreshed by hypnosis,” because a justice system that needs the greatest possible certainty regarded material obtained through hypnotic regression as offering the least.

Lost in the Mall: when ordinary suggestion builds a whole memory

At this point some readers may think, “So the problem is hypnosis.” But the most famous experiment in memory science says the problem runs deeper than that.

In 1995, Elizabeth Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell of the University of Washington contacted participants’ families to collect three real childhood events. The research team then invented a fourth. They told participants that their family had described a time when, around the age of five, they had become lost in a shopping mall; frightened, the poor child had cried until an elderly woman came to help and eventually reunited them with the family. The team had quietly confirmed with the families beforehand that this had never happened. Participants then read all four stories (three real ones from the family and one secretly fabricated by the researchers, all presented as coming from the family), wrote down whatever details they could remember, and were interviewed twice more over the following weeks.

About one in four participants “remembered” the fabricated mall episode. And not merely remembered it: in the follow-up interviews they described details that had never appeared in the story the researchers gave them to read — what the elderly woman looked like, the clothes worn that day, the feeling of fear. The false memory grew of its own accord each time the brain retrieved it.

This experiment became the starting point for a great deal of further research replicating and extending the same finding, and the crucial point for our subject is this: Loftus used no hypnosis at all. Suggestion from a trusted source, plus repeated invitations to look back, was enough to build an entire memory. Now consider what happens when you add a focused, relaxed state in which critical judgement is set aside, add the expectation that something will be found, and add leading questions from someone we are paying and trusting — “look more closely; who is there; what are they doing to you?” In other words, the regression room assembles every condition for creating a false memory in a single place.

Where past lives come from: the experiments that asked directly

And what about past-life regression? With no family to check the account against, how can we know where the story of a past life comes from?

Nicholas Spanos and colleagues at Carleton University answered this with four studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1991. They hypnotised participants and suggested they go back to “before the point of your birth.” The findings came in three layers.

First: those regressed to a past life typically gave historically inaccurate information. They lacked knowledge that people of that era would have had, and made errors nobody living then could have made — not knowing who ruled their own country, or using a currency that did not yet exist.

Second — and this layer matters most — when the researchers changed what participants were told before hypnosis, the content of the past life changed accordingly. Participants told in advance that past-life identities are often of a different sex, of a different ethnicity, and often abused in childhood, went on to report past lives with those very characteristics markedly more often than participants who had not been primed. The “past life,” then, reflects the suggestions the hypnotist has passed to the person being regressed — not a real past unearthed.

Third: the belief that the experience was real did not depend on hypnotic susceptibility. It depended on pre-existing belief in reincarnation, and on whether the hypnotist framed the experience as “real” or as “an interesting product of imagination.” The same person, the same experience, can be believed differently depending on the words the hypnotist chooses.

And to show this is not a matter of Western culture alone, there is a study published in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, conducted at the request of a South Korean television station. The researchers chose one identity from real history and one from fiction, and during the countdown leading participants into a past life, inserted a brief suggestion of that identity three times. Five of the six participants “recalled” a past life matching the suggested identity, complete with emotional and historical detail — including those given the fictional character. The team summed it up plainly: controlling which identity appears in a past-life regression is strikingly easy and direct.

Even reincarnation researchers reject past-life regression

This may surprise many people. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia devoted his life to studying more than two thousand cases worldwide of children who claimed to remember previous lives. He was the most serious academic investigator of the reincarnation question in the world — and he explicitly rejected past-life regression, going so far as to write a 1994 paper calling it an example of “the psychotherapist’s fallacy.”

The research unit he founded, the Division of Perceptual Studies, still publishes a warning about it today, and it addresses precisely the two most common counter-arguments. First, intense emotional experience during a past-life regression is no guarantee that what surfaced is the memory of a real life: the sense of living another life may be impressive to the person having it, but it may be imagination, as most of our dreams are. Second, improvement in physical or psychological symptoms after a past-life regression is not evidence that the past life was real, because such symptoms improve with many kinds of therapy, through the general effects all therapies share.

In other words, the people most inclined to believe in past lives still say: do not use hypnosis to look for them.

The human cost: lessons from the memory wars

All of this may sound like laboratory business. But in the 1980s and 1990s, as hypnotic regression began to influence people’s lives, it left a wound on society.

In that period a practice called recovered memory therapy became extremely popular, using hypnotic regression and imagery techniques to “uncover” repressed memories of childhood abuse. Many clients left the therapy room with intense new memories and the conviction that what they had seen under regression was true, leading to families torn apart, lawsuits, and a number of parents accused of events that had never happened — before, in time, a considerable number of clients retracted their accusations, having realised those memories had been created within the therapy itself. This group was studied systematically by Lief and Fetkewicz in 1995, and the whole phenomenon was reviewed by Steven Jay Lynn and colleagues in a paper aptly titled “Recalling the Unrecallable.”

It must be said plainly that childhood abuse is real and has happened to a great many people. The lesson of that era is not that memories of abuse are false. It is that the tools used to “dig up” those memories are capable of creating them, even in people who never experienced such events — and when a false memory of abuse is planted in someone’s mind, the cost is certainly not confined to one person.

To anyone who has already been through a regression

If you have read this far and feel unsteady because you have been through an age regression or a past-life regression, we would like to say three things.

One: your experience is not fake. The emotion of that moment was real, the tears were real, and you were not wrong to believe it — because, as the research shows, this mechanism works best in people with strong imagination and openness to new things, which are good qualities to have in a life.

Two: what you “saw” may hold value as a symbolic language of the mind — like a dream telling you something about what you are carrying — without needing to be a historical record. Shifting from “this is what really happened” to “this is what my mind made, and what might it be telling me?” does not diminish the experience. It makes it much safer.

Three: if what you “found” in a regression is heavy — particularly a memory of harm that did not exist before the hypnosis — please review it slowly with a trauma-informed mental health professional, without rushing to conclusions or to major decisions on the strength of that memory alone. And if there are stretches where it is too heavy to carry by yourself, Thailand’s mental health hotline 1323 always has someone ready to listen.

Where NBRH stands: why we do not use regression

People ask us directly: as a hypnotherapy practice, why not offer regression when so many people want it? The answer is this entire article — but let us put it in three plain reasons.

The first: we do not want to be the ones who create a memory for anyone. In the therapy room, a hypnotherapist must be trusted for the client to reach a state where critical judgement slows; and both parties expect that something will be found. That is the Loftus recipe plus the Spanos recipe, every ingredient present. However careful a practitioner is, a small question such as “and who is there?” is enough to plant something. So we choose not to enter that territory in the first place.

The second: what we work with does not depend on the accuracy of memory at all. This is the heart of the Neuro-Behavioral Repatterning approach. We do not ask “which event did this problem start with?” We ask “how does your system respond now?” — the anxiety that spikes at a certain tone of voice, the tightness in the chest when you have to refuse someone, the loop of thought that has become an automatic program. All of it occurs in the present, can be observed in the present, and operates in the present, without needing to know when the program was written. It is like repairing software that is misbehaving: the engineer does not need to know who wrote the bug ten years ago. Seeing how it runs now is enough to change it.

The third: a client should own the story of their own life. When nothing has to be uncovered or confirmed, there is no risk of anyone leaving the room with a new story about their parents, their partner, or a past life — a story they did not choose and cannot verify. What a client takes away is a more flexible pattern of response, within a life that remains entirely their own.

And in the same spirit of honesty with our readers: hypnotherapy has good supporting evidence in a number of areas, such as pain management, irritable bowel syndrome, and certain forms of anxiety. But our particular way of working with present-day patterns of response reflects our framework and our observations from the therapy room, not a direct conclusion from research. We are not saying our way is the only answer. We are saying that when seventy years of evidence points in one direction — that hypnotic regression is unreliable as a tool for finding truth — we choose not to use it as a tool for finding truth. And hypnotherapy is not a substitute for medical or psychological diagnosis and care where these are needed.

Virginia Tighe spent the rest of her life trying to step away from the story of Bridey Murphy. She never was a nineteenth-century Irish woman. But she remains one of the best reminders we have of how good the human mind is at telling stories — and why anyone who works with the human mind should take the greatest care not to become the one who feeds it the script.

NBRH (Neuro-Behavioral Repatterning) believes that our behaviour and our responses are not a fixed identity, but patterns shaped by experience — patterns that can gradually change given care and the right conditions. We use hypnotherapy as our principal way of working with these automatic loops in the present, without seeking or confirming memories of the past, in a space that is safe, private, and always respectful of each person’s own pace.

References

Council on Scientific Affairs, American Medical Association. (1985). Scientific status of refreshing recollection by the use of hypnosis. JAMA, 253(13), 1918–1923.
Lief, H. I., & Fetkewicz, J. (1995). Retractions of false memory: The evolution of pseudo-memories. Journal of Psychiatry & Law, 23(3), 411–435.
Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25(12), 720–725.
Lynn, S. J., Lock, T. G., Myers, B., & Payne, D. G. (1997). Recalling the unrecallable: Should hypnosis be used to recover memories in psychotherapy? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 6(3), 79–83.
Nash, M. R. (1987). What, if anything, is regressed about hypnotic age regression? A review of the empirical literature. Psychological Bulletin, 102(1), 42–52.
Nash, M. R., Drake, S. D., Wiley, S., Khalsa, S., & Lynn, S. J. (1986). Accuracy of recall by hypnotically age-regressed subjects. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 298–300.
Orne, M. T. (1951). The mechanisms of hypnotic age regression: An experimental study. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 46(2), 213–225.
Pyun, Y. D., & Kim, Y. J. (2009). Creating past-life identity in hypnotic regression. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 57(3), 336–346.
Spanos, N. P., Menary, E., Gabora, N. J., DuBreuil, S. C., & Dewhirst, B. (1991). Secondary identity enactments during hypnotic past-life regression: A sociocognitive perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(2), 308–320.
Steblay, N. M., & Bothwell, R. K. (1994). Evidence for hypnotically refreshed testimony: The view from the laboratory. Law and Human Behavior, 18(6), 635–651.
Stevenson, I. (1994). A case of the psychotherapist’s fallacy: Hypnotic regression to “previous lives”. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 36(3), 188–192.
University of Virginia, Division of Perceptual Studies. Concerns about hypnotic regression.
Bernstein, M. (1956). The Search for Bridey Murphy. Doubleday. (Case study and subsequent press investigation.)

How Reliable Is Hypnotic Regression? What Seventy Years of Research Tells Us — and Why NBRH Does Not Use It