Your brain is OK (in regard of this forgotten thread, though ). Brain is a device of survival, not a tape recorder (!). Brain is not designed to have a perfect memory, but to have human being(s) survived in a constant changing environment.
I am a believer, but I don't know why. I mean that I can't find a rational, logical explanation for this. "Worst" than that : I do believe that knowledge is not enterily rational.
All the subjects that you bring here are very interesting. I used to have a lot to say about all this when I was younger. I still have a few opinions. One of these opinions is : whatever afterlife that can be, a person is unique and this particular unicity is terminated forever at the moment of death just like if afterlife does not exist.
***
"He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."
Not that - in my mind - this means something "negative", as impermanence is the only permanence. It just means that every bit of life is so glorious : a gem, unique and precious.
***
"He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."
Another opinion that lingers : Love (in all its forms) given and received is eternal once created in lives-Life. Death can not terminate Love. If I have loved a man and this ends, love that was experienced is not disapearing at the same time.
***
"He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."
The last thing that I have come about in regard of "Life after Life" is this novel, that I read at the end of December, and i entered the New Year finishing it :
The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
"Macmillan, 2009-12-01 - 336 pages
My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. This is Susie Salmon. Watching from heaven, Susie sees her happy, suburban family devastated by her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet . . . The Lovely Bonesis a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and vengeance, memory and forgetting but, above all, about finding light in the darkest of places. 'Spare, beautiful and brutal prose . . . The Lovely Bones is compulsive enough to read in a single sitting, brilliantly intelligent, elegantly constructed and ultimately intriguing' The Times 'Moving and compelling . . . It will put an imperceptible but stealthily insistent hold on you. I sat down in the morning to read the first couple of pages; five hours later, I was still there, book in hand, transfixed' Maggie O'Farrell, Sunday Telegraph"
I, personally, found it round and soft and hard, as a peeple polished by time in a river and the ocean.
***
"He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love."
). Brain is a device of survival, not a tape recorder (!). Brain is not designed to have a perfect memory, but to have human being(s) survived in a constant changing environment. 
I used to have a lot to say about all this when I was younger. I still have a few opinions. 
One of these opinions is : whatever afterlife that can be, a person is unique and this particular unicity is terminated forever at the moment of death just like if afterlife does not exist.