And for a decent introduction to critical thinking in general, I can highly recommend Carl Sagan's book, "The Demon-Haunted World".
Among many other good things in this book, there is a chapter called “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” which is the best primer in detecting bad thinking I've seen.
It's interesting to note that some time after writing this, Sagan became aware of the work of Jim Tucker, at the University of Virginia, attempting to validate the "past life" reports of children who've offered verifiable details in their accounts. Many children make such claims, but, as Sagan observed, “Young children sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.”
I won't assert the truth of it, and I can think of a couple plausible vectors that don't involve consciousness surviving death and into another body (however unlikely they might be), but if it's compelling enough for the author of The Demon Haunted World to suggest it deserves "serious study", I'm the last person in the world to gainsay him.
I think he is not asking a "serious study" because he think it's real, but because at some point we must make the experiments to verify or falsify the theories. (I think that the problem is that there is finite time and finite money for the experiments, so we must select only some of them.)
I think we're in agreement. This is him saying, "I think it's interesting enough to expend that effort." No one else has to agree, but that a mind like his thinks so, and based on what I've read of these accounts, I'm inclined to agree.
I have no idea how to go about falsifying that, though. You'd at a minimum have to strictly monitor the information flow into a child's environment, probably from birth, to control for any other vectors for verifiable details. All in the hopes that some of the study population's children will mention something you can confirm they didn't overhear, or whatever, which turns out to comport with the life of someone who's passed. That's perhaps a tough sell to the ethics committee.
Among many other good things in this book, there is a chapter called “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” which is the best primer in detecting bad thinking I've seen.