Would this be decent evidence for reincarnation?

[Angrboda]

I kind of zoned out on the tl;dr of the last page, so apologies in advance. The long and short of it is that there are solid scientific reasons for dismissing the results of reincarnation studies, and it's not because people are dogmatically opposed to the supernatural. The studies involved are examples of extremely poorly designed studies, with the result being that there is not adequate justification for assigning any degree of confidence, whether 0% or 100%, to their conclusions. I'd go into detail, but I'm feeling lazy. There is one scientist who devoted the bulk of his life to research into the question, and his studies are generally considered the most significant in the field and are probably what one should focus on. If memory serves, there are a number of good articles on his work at csicop.org, and Mary Roach's book Spook goes into the subject (and she's funny as hell to read, so, recommended).

As to the question of why children are used, yes, there are mundane reasons having to do with our biases surrounding the testimony of children. However, the more significant reason is that the younger the subject, the less potential that the person's testimony has been contaminated by acquisition of information from mundane sources. The younger the subject, presumably, the greater confidence that the subject could not have obtained their knowledge of the target through any other means but reincarnation. (It's worth noting that most conventional depictions of reincarnation posit that the reincarnated soul has no memory of their past lives. This is plentifully represented in myth across cultures as diverse as the Greeks with their myth of the river Lethe to the Chinese goddess Meng Po Niang and her five flavored tea of forgetfulness. Thus the studies of 'memories' of reincarnated subjects appears to involve the addition of some hefty ad hoc assumptions, because, without them, there would be nothing to study.)

When people talk about the possibility of souls, dualism, transmigration, and asserting that the link between consciousness and the brain has not been proven, it's typically abundantly clear that much of the person's confidence in the matter is a product of being greatly ignorant of the subject, and basing their speculations on the acquired wisdom of experience and a folk psychology acquired from the culture at large. Their views are ill-informed on the subject because they themselves are ill-informed on the subject, and much of the facts which might qualify their opinion on the matter are in the realm of 'unknown unknowns'. But there appears to be a similar phenomenon on the other side of the coin in people who, equally as ignorant of the specific facts of brain science, assert that the mind is the brain. From these sort of people, you'll receive explanations on the order of suggesting that if you smush enough computational units together, in a complex way, consciousness will pop out; or the ever popular, 'consciousness is an emergent property'. To my view, these 'explanations' are little more than saying that 'it's magic', as these 'explanations' don't actually explain, and are little more than modern substitutes for previous folk wisdom. The view that the mind is the brain seems to be as often informed by ignorance of the subject as the assertion that the mind isn't necessarily the brain is, and the degree, kind of ignorance, and actual sources of confidence in the two assertions often appears remarkably similar.