According to a new study, people who believe that they have lived past lives are more prone to what is called “source monitoring errors.” This means that they have difficulty recognizing where a memory came from.

Researchers recruited people who had come to believe that they had experienced a past-life regression through hypnosis, as well as those who did not believe in reincarnation. They were put through a test where they had to read 40 non-famous names aloud. After a two-hour wait, they were to identify famous names out of the list they were given, plus a list of famous names and another list of non-famous names that they hadn’t seen.

Believers were twice as likely as their counterparts to misidentify the non-famous names they had seen on the first list as famous. Lead researcher, Maarten Peters of Maastricht University in The Netherlands thinks that people who are prone to making source monitoring errors can’t distinguish between things that have really happened and things that have been suggested to them. When put under hypnosis and repeatedly asked to talk about the potential idea of a past life, the risk of that idea turning into a false memory is greatly increased.

Past life memories are not the only memories being studied. Richard McNally of Harvard University conducted a similar study on alien abductees and found that they are also prone to commit source monitoring errors. McNally says that these errors occur with people who are more creative than the average person.