The Science of Reincarnation
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Many eastern religions and new age traditions believe in some form of physical rebirth, or Reincarnation, but you don't need faith to think it happens. Over the last 60 years, researchers have documented several thousand cases in which young children recalled the events of a previous life in such detail that those experiences could be confidently matched to recently deceased individuals. Though this evidence has been largely rejected by mainstream science, it compels us to explore new theories of the human mind, and to consider the possibility that consciousness might survive bodily death.
Reincarnation in Tradition
Some of the world's oldest religions hold reincarnation, or rebirth, as a fundamental tenet of their beliefs. In all the Indian religions ‒ Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism ‒ it is believed that people are fated for an endless cycle of rebirth, as humans, animals, or even plants, according to the tradition, unless they manage to escape. In Hinduism, it is thought that one is reincarnated into better or worse conditions according to one's karma, while other traditions hold that you can plan your next rebirth. Tibetan Buddhism holds that every Dalai Lama since the 15th century has been the same person reincarnated more than a dozen times. Before every death, he instructs his followers on where to find him in his next life. Other cultures outside of East Asia, such as the Tlingit of the Alaskan Panhandle, and the Druze of Western Asia, also have a high prevalence of belief in reincarnation, with their own metaphysical assumptions.
The idea of rebirth is not nearly as prevalent in the West, or in any of the Abrahamic religions. Some Kabbalic Jews profess belief in reincarnation, as have some Christian minority movements, including some early Gnostic sects, the Medieval Cathars, and the 17th-century Rosicrucians. But most Abrahamic traditions hold that following death, the soul passes permanently to the afterlife, an idea that's essential to the doctrines of salvation and the judgement. However, the idea of reincarnation was discussed amongst the Greeks, and entered the Western consciousness when Renaissance thinkers began translating Pythagoras and Plato after the 14th century. In the 19th century, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer commented on the idea of rebirth as presented in the Indian Scriptures. From these commentaries, writers like Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman helped further popularize the concept, as did the psychologist William James, who introduced it to psychology and the American Society for Psychical Research. At the same time, the occult philosopher Helena Blavatsky incorporated a doctrine of rebirth into Theosophy, a forerunner of the new age movement, and the concept of reincarnation flourished with the rise of spiritualism in the early 20th century.
The Science of Reincarnation
Reincarnation did not come under the scrutiny of Western science until the late 1950s. It began with Ian Stevenson, a Canadian physician and psychiatrist, and after 1957, head of the department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia. Stevenson had an interest in parapsychology, and in 1960 he authored a review of the published evidence for reincarnation. The article caught the attention of the founder of the Parapsychology Foundation, who gave Stevenson a grant to interview a child in India claiming past-life memories. After interviewing the child, he interviewed several others claiming past-life memories, then documented several more cases in Sri Lanka, Brazil, Alaska, and Lebanon. On the basis of these interviews he published the seminal book, 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, in 1966. This book represented the first time cases of past-life memories had been presented as anything other than anecdotes: it introduced the first data on reincarnation.
Stevenson's evidence was convincing: In about half of all cases, researchers or family members were able to identify the past-life persona, and in many cases, meet with surviving relatives. In some cases, Stevenson interviewed the child and the family before they connected with the past-life family, and accompanied them on their first contacts so he could note who and what the children were able to recognize. He was confident that he had nearly ruled out fraud in the vast majority of cases. Every time a past-life match was identified, Stevenson was able to verify at least a few of the claims made by the children. In hundreds of cases, researchers were able to verify scores of very specific claims, such as names of past-life relatives, past-life occupations, and causes of death. For example, an Indian boy named Ravi Shankar recalled from the age of 2 or 3 a previous life in which he'd been beheaded by a scheming relative. Shankar was able to recall the names of the murderers, the weapon used, and the location of the crime, among other details, all of which corresponded to a real case in a nearby village.
At the same time, Dr. Helen Wambach, a clinical psychologist at JFK University set out to prove that past-life memories were all fantasy. She began a 10-year survey of past-life memories retrieved from hypnotized people asked to relive a previous life and recount specific details about such things as the clothing they wore, the jobs they worked, and the tools they used in their day-to-day lives. When checked against known historical realities, all but 11 of over 1000 subjects reported highly accurate information, right down to the utensils and footwear of previous peoples. Wombach became so convinced in the accuracy of past-life recall that she went on to conduct a study of over 2500 people using hypnotic progression, though only a small fraction of her subjects were able to place themselves in future lives, and the information could not be verified.
With funding from Chester Carlson, the founder of Xerox, Stevenson created the Division of Perceptual Studies for researching reincarnation in 1967, and worked full time at this small research division for the next 40 years, collecting thousands of cases. He published his findings in a 4-part series called Cases of the Reincarnation Type, beginning in 1975. The series got a few other academics interested in reincarnation research in the 70s and 80s, including psychologists Satwant Pasricha and Erlendur Haraldsson, and anthropologist, Antonia Mills. More recently, physician Walter Semkiw, psychiatrist Jim Tucker, and anthropologist James Matlock have studied Stevenson's cases, among others, and offered new insights. Tucker now maintains the database, and has headed the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia since 2014.
How it Works
The University of Virginia database now contains roughly 2500 cases of alleged reincarnation and past-life recall. Most cases come from Asian countries more sympathetic to the idea of rebirth, with only about 10% originating in the West, but the phenomenon is global. Although there are many cases of adults having spontaneous past-life recall, in most instances, memories are recalled from the ages of 2 or 3, and lost completely between the ages of 5 and 8. About 70% of all cases involve memories of a violent death, for reasons that are unclear. Some people even claim to remember their existence between lives, and recall "entering" their new body, before or after birth.
Stevenson found that children with past-life recall often inherit the physical and behavioural characteristics of their past-life incarnations. Many are born with birthmarks, sores, and deformities corresponding with significant marks on their previous bodies. For example, many people killed by gunshot are reincarnated into bodies with birthmarks corresponding to the entry and exit wounds of the lethal bullet. In the Tlingit culture, people are sometimes branded with personalized body "tags," which appear on later babies. As Stevenson and Semkiw discovered in the late 1990s, facial features are often preserved between lives as well, as photo comparisons attest. Semkiw has also presented evidence that people can reincarnate in groups. For example, he has made the case that he and all the presidential candidates in the 2000 American election had lived previous lives in politics during the American revolution.
Behaviours, aptitudes, and phobias can also be transferred between incarnations. One of Stevenson's cases involved a Sri Lankan boy in the late 1940s who recalled a previous life in England. The boy learned English much faster than his siblings, was naturally skilled with forks and knives, and spoke of things unknown to most south Asian children at the time, including natural ice and horse carriages. The boy loved automobiles, and after moving to England, entered a car race in Scotland and won first place, the only one of 22 entrants to come from Asia. Individuals reincarnated after a violent passing typically exhibit a phobia of their past-life cause of death. For example, an Indian girl named Uttara Huddar periodically identified as a Bengali girl named Sharada, who claimed to have been killed by a snakebite to the right big toe. Though Uttara did not share her consciousness with Sharada, she had a strong fear of snakes. Most strikingly, people with past-life memories can sometimes speak the language of their past-life identity, even when they had no opportunity to learn the language in their present life. For example, Uttara spoke only Marathi, though Sharada spoke Bengali.
The global median intermission time - or the time between the death of the past-life individual and the birth of the reincarnated child - is about 15 months, but specific times reflect cultural assumptions, as do other factors. In the west, for example, it's much more common to have intermissions spanning decades, while it's rarely much more than a year in most Asian cultures. In patriarchal societies, it is more common for people to reincarnate along their father's bloodline, whereas in matriarchal societies, it is more common to reincarnate along the mother's. In all cultures, however, it is most common to reincarnate nearby to one's previous life, and within a familiar cultural group. People also tend to reincarnate as the same sex.
There is evidence to suggest that people can plan their next rebirth. Especially in cultures that believe you can, people will announce their reincarnation before death. For example, in one of Stevenson's earliest cases, an elderly Tlingit man announced to his son and daughter-in-law that he would return as their son, then not yet conceived, and told them that they would recognize him by the marks on his body. The man had two distinct blemishes on his left shoulder and forearm, and when his daughter-in-law had a son a few years later, the boy did too. He later came to identify with his grandfather, and exhibit many of his mannerisms and aptitudes. It's also common for some relative of the reincarnated child - often the mother - to have a dream in which the deceased personality appears to announce their impending reincarnation, or to have a dream connected with that person's death. For example, Uttara's mother had dreams of a snakebite to the right big toe during pregnancy.
Reception
The data on reincarnation demonstrate that past-life memories are highly accurate in at least half of all cases. However, the reaction from academia has been lukewarm, at best, though Stevenson did get some early praise in the mid 1970s. The Journal of the American Medical Association claimed that the cases presented were "difficult to explain on any assumption other than reincarnation." The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease devoted an entire issue to Stevenson's work in which psychiatrist Harold Lief remarked that Stevenson might one day be known "as the Galileo of the 20th Century." Even Carl Sagan, a noted debunker of anomalous phenomena, said that the research on reincarnation was convincing, and ought to be continued. However, most academics have simply ignored the research, or dismissed it on the assumption that the researchers had been too gullible, or too reluctant to accept more prosaic explanations. Skeptics maintain that the supposedly reincarnated children could have learned of their past-life personas through other means, and that the researchers' bias led them to accept a "paranormal" explanation where a simpler one would have sufficed.
The debate over reincarnation reflects a wider debate over the nature of the human mind and its relationship to the natural world. The dominant assumption amongst Western academics is that consciousness is entirely reducible to physical activity in the brain. In this view, it's assumed that when the physical body dies, one's conscious experience ends, and one's personality, spirit, or soul ceases to exist. If this is true, then it would be impossible for any aspect of a person to survive bodily death, let alone to reincarnate in another form. The very possibility of reincarnation requires a new theory of consciousness that holds it to be independent of the human body.
Although it's possible to accept the reincarnation data without accepting the reincarnation hypothesis, these explanations too challenge scientific materialism. Some researchers, including parapsychologist Stephen E. Braude of the University of Maryland, as well as Stevenson himself, have argued that at least some cases of apparent reincarnation could be explained by supposing that the child acquired their past-life memories by means of psi-phenomena, in the same way that mediums are alleged to acquire messages from the deceased. This would not explain why most children identify with the past-life persona, however. Stevenson had also proposed the "possession" hypothesis, where it is supposed that a dead person's "spirit" or "consciousness" can temporarily take over the mind and body of a living person, but he did not consider this to be likely in most cases.
Summary
Though it's still the stuff of Eastern religions and new age fantasies to most Western thinkers, there is actually a tremendous body of evidence to support the idea of rebirth. The implications for the philosophy of mind, as well as for our wider understanding of the physical universe, are hard to overstate. Though it's largely been ignored till now, the science of reincarnation is likely to lead to a revolution in our understanding of human consciousness, and challenge scientists to take seriously the idea of life after death.
Sources:
Ian Stevenson. Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. New York: American Society for Psychical Research. 1966.
Jim Tucker. "Children Who Claim to Remember Previous Lives: Past, Present, and Future Research." Journal of Scientific Exploration 21, no. 3 (2007), 543 - 552.
Walter Semkiw. Return of the Revolutionaries: The Case for Reincarnation and Soul Groups Reunited. Charlottesville: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2003.
Various Interviews with Walter Semkiw, James Matlock, and Stephen Braude on New Thinking Allowed, with Jeffrey Mishlove: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFk448YbGITLnzplK7jwNcw.
Support new videos on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3375417
Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Illustration by Colin Campbell. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.
Many eastern religions and new age traditions believe in some form of physical rebirth, or Reincarnation, but you don't need faith to think it happens. Over the last 60 years, researchers have documented several thousand cases in which young children recalled the events of a previous life in such detail that those experiences could be confidently matched to recently deceased individuals. Though this evidence has been largely rejected by mainstream science, it compels us to explore new theories of the human mind, and to consider the possibility that consciousness might survive bodily death.
Reincarnation in Tradition
Some of the world's oldest religions hold reincarnation, or rebirth, as a fundamental tenet of their beliefs. In all the Indian religions ‒ Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism ‒ it is believed that people are fated for an endless cycle of rebirth, as humans, animals, or even plants, according to the tradition, unless they manage to escape. In Hinduism, it is thought that one is reincarnated into better or worse conditions according to one's karma, while other traditions hold that you can plan your next rebirth. Tibetan Buddhism holds that every Dalai Lama since the 15th century has been the same person reincarnated more than a dozen times. Before every death, he instructs his followers on where to find him in his next life. Other cultures outside of East Asia, such as the Tlingit of the Alaskan Panhandle, and the Druze of Western Asia, also have a high prevalence of belief in reincarnation, with their own metaphysical assumptions.
The idea of rebirth is not nearly as prevalent in the West, or in any of the Abrahamic religions. Some Kabbalic Jews profess belief in reincarnation, as have some Christian minority movements, including some early Gnostic sects, the Medieval Cathars, and the 17th-century Rosicrucians. But most Abrahamic traditions hold that following death, the soul passes permanently to the afterlife, an idea that's essential to the doctrines of salvation and the judgement. However, the idea of reincarnation was discussed amongst the Greeks, and entered the Western consciousness when Renaissance thinkers began translating Pythagoras and Plato after the 14th century. In the 19th century, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer commented on the idea of rebirth as presented in the Indian Scriptures. From these commentaries, writers like Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman helped further popularize the concept, as did the psychologist William James, who introduced it to psychology and the American Society for Psychical Research. At the same time, the occult philosopher Helena Blavatsky incorporated a doctrine of rebirth into Theosophy, a forerunner of the new age movement, and the concept of reincarnation flourished with the rise of spiritualism in the early 20th century.
The Science of Reincarnation
Reincarnation did not come under the scrutiny of Western science until the late 1950s. It began with Ian Stevenson, a Canadian physician and psychiatrist, and after 1957, head of the department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia. Stevenson had an interest in parapsychology, and in 1960 he authored a review of the published evidence for reincarnation. The article caught the attention of the founder of the Parapsychology Foundation, who gave Stevenson a grant to interview a child in India claiming past-life memories. After interviewing the child, he interviewed several others claiming past-life memories, then documented several more cases in Sri Lanka, Brazil, Alaska, and Lebanon. On the basis of these interviews he published the seminal book, 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, in 1966. This book represented the first time cases of past-life memories had been presented as anything other than anecdotes: it introduced the first data on reincarnation.
Stevenson's evidence was convincing: In about half of all cases, researchers or family members were able to identify the past-life persona, and in many cases, meet with surviving relatives. In some cases, Stevenson interviewed the child and the family before they connected with the past-life family, and accompanied them on their first contacts so he could note who and what the children were able to recognize. He was confident that he had nearly ruled out fraud in the vast majority of cases. Every time a past-life match was identified, Stevenson was able to verify at least a few of the claims made by the children. In hundreds of cases, researchers were able to verify scores of very specific claims, such as names of past-life relatives, past-life occupations, and causes of death. For example, an Indian boy named Ravi Shankar recalled from the age of 2 or 3 a previous life in which he'd been beheaded by a scheming relative. Shankar was able to recall the names of the murderers, the weapon used, and the location of the crime, among other details, all of which corresponded to a real case in a nearby village.
At the same time, Dr. Helen Wambach, a clinical psychologist at JFK University set out to prove that past-life memories were all fantasy. She began a 10-year survey of past-life memories retrieved from hypnotized people asked to relive a previous life and recount specific details about such things as the clothing they wore, the jobs they worked, and the tools they used in their day-to-day lives. When checked against known historical realities, all but 11 of over 1000 subjects reported highly accurate information, right down to the utensils and footwear of previous peoples. Wombach became so convinced in the accuracy of past-life recall that she went on to conduct a study of over 2500 people using hypnotic progression, though only a small fraction of her subjects were able to place themselves in future lives, and the information could not be verified.
With funding from Chester Carlson, the founder of Xerox, Stevenson created the Division of Perceptual Studies for researching reincarnation in 1967, and worked full time at this small research division for the next 40 years, collecting thousands of cases. He published his findings in a 4-part series called Cases of the Reincarnation Type, beginning in 1975. The series got a few other academics interested in reincarnation research in the 70s and 80s, including psychologists Satwant Pasricha and Erlendur Haraldsson, and anthropologist, Antonia Mills. More recently, physician Walter Semkiw, psychiatrist Jim Tucker, and anthropologist James Matlock have studied Stevenson's cases, among others, and offered new insights. Tucker now maintains the database, and has headed the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia since 2014.
How it Works
The University of Virginia database now contains roughly 2500 cases of alleged reincarnation and past-life recall. Most cases come from Asian countries more sympathetic to the idea of rebirth, with only about 10% originating in the West, but the phenomenon is global. Although there are many cases of adults having spontaneous past-life recall, in most instances, memories are recalled from the ages of 2 or 3, and lost completely between the ages of 5 and 8. About 70% of all cases involve memories of a violent death, for reasons that are unclear. Some people even claim to remember their existence between lives, and recall "entering" their new body, before or after birth.
Stevenson found that children with past-life recall often inherit the physical and behavioural characteristics of their past-life incarnations. Many are born with birthmarks, sores, and deformities corresponding with significant marks on their previous bodies. For example, many people killed by gunshot are reincarnated into bodies with birthmarks corresponding to the entry and exit wounds of the lethal bullet. In the Tlingit culture, people are sometimes branded with personalized body "tags," which appear on later babies. As Stevenson and Semkiw discovered in the late 1990s, facial features are often preserved between lives as well, as photo comparisons attest. Semkiw has also presented evidence that people can reincarnate in groups. For example, he has made the case that he and all the presidential candidates in the 2000 American election had lived previous lives in politics during the American revolution.
Behaviours, aptitudes, and phobias can also be transferred between incarnations. One of Stevenson's cases involved a Sri Lankan boy in the late 1940s who recalled a previous life in England. The boy learned English much faster than his siblings, was naturally skilled with forks and knives, and spoke of things unknown to most south Asian children at the time, including natural ice and horse carriages. The boy loved automobiles, and after moving to England, entered a car race in Scotland and won first place, the only one of 22 entrants to come from Asia. Individuals reincarnated after a violent passing typically exhibit a phobia of their past-life cause of death. For example, an Indian girl named Uttara Huddar periodically identified as a Bengali girl named Sharada, who claimed to have been killed by a snakebite to the right big toe. Though Uttara did not share her consciousness with Sharada, she had a strong fear of snakes. Most strikingly, people with past-life memories can sometimes speak the language of their past-life identity, even when they had no opportunity to learn the language in their present life. For example, Uttara spoke only Marathi, though Sharada spoke Bengali.
The global median intermission time - or the time between the death of the past-life individual and the birth of the reincarnated child - is about 15 months, but specific times reflect cultural assumptions, as do other factors. In the west, for example, it's much more common to have intermissions spanning decades, while it's rarely much more than a year in most Asian cultures. In patriarchal societies, it is more common for people to reincarnate along their father's bloodline, whereas in matriarchal societies, it is more common to reincarnate along the mother's. In all cultures, however, it is most common to reincarnate nearby to one's previous life, and within a familiar cultural group. People also tend to reincarnate as the same sex.
There is evidence to suggest that people can plan their next rebirth. Especially in cultures that believe you can, people will announce their reincarnation before death. For example, in one of Stevenson's earliest cases, an elderly Tlingit man announced to his son and daughter-in-law that he would return as their son, then not yet conceived, and told them that they would recognize him by the marks on his body. The man had two distinct blemishes on his left shoulder and forearm, and when his daughter-in-law had a son a few years later, the boy did too. He later came to identify with his grandfather, and exhibit many of his mannerisms and aptitudes. It's also common for some relative of the reincarnated child - often the mother - to have a dream in which the deceased personality appears to announce their impending reincarnation, or to have a dream connected with that person's death. For example, Uttara's mother had dreams of a snakebite to the right big toe during pregnancy.
Reception
The data on reincarnation demonstrate that past-life memories are highly accurate in at least half of all cases. However, the reaction from academia has been lukewarm, at best, though Stevenson did get some early praise in the mid 1970s. The Journal of the American Medical Association claimed that the cases presented were "difficult to explain on any assumption other than reincarnation." The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease devoted an entire issue to Stevenson's work in which psychiatrist Harold Lief remarked that Stevenson might one day be known "as the Galileo of the 20th Century." Even Carl Sagan, a noted debunker of anomalous phenomena, said that the research on reincarnation was convincing, and ought to be continued. However, most academics have simply ignored the research, or dismissed it on the assumption that the researchers had been too gullible, or too reluctant to accept more prosaic explanations. Skeptics maintain that the supposedly reincarnated children could have learned of their past-life personas through other means, and that the researchers' bias led them to accept a "paranormal" explanation where a simpler one would have sufficed.
The debate over reincarnation reflects a wider debate over the nature of the human mind and its relationship to the natural world. The dominant assumption amongst Western academics is that consciousness is entirely reducible to physical activity in the brain. In this view, it's assumed that when the physical body dies, one's conscious experience ends, and one's personality, spirit, or soul ceases to exist. If this is true, then it would be impossible for any aspect of a person to survive bodily death, let alone to reincarnate in another form. The very possibility of reincarnation requires a new theory of consciousness that holds it to be independent of the human body.
Although it's possible to accept the reincarnation data without accepting the reincarnation hypothesis, these explanations too challenge scientific materialism. Some researchers, including parapsychologist Stephen E. Braude of the University of Maryland, as well as Stevenson himself, have argued that at least some cases of apparent reincarnation could be explained by supposing that the child acquired their past-life memories by means of psi-phenomena, in the same way that mediums are alleged to acquire messages from the deceased. This would not explain why most children identify with the past-life persona, however. Stevenson had also proposed the "possession" hypothesis, where it is supposed that a dead person's "spirit" or "consciousness" can temporarily take over the mind and body of a living person, but he did not consider this to be likely in most cases.
Summary
Though it's still the stuff of Eastern religions and new age fantasies to most Western thinkers, there is actually a tremendous body of evidence to support the idea of rebirth. The implications for the philosophy of mind, as well as for our wider understanding of the physical universe, are hard to overstate. Though it's largely been ignored till now, the science of reincarnation is likely to lead to a revolution in our understanding of human consciousness, and challenge scientists to take seriously the idea of life after death.
Sources:
Ian Stevenson. Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. New York: American Society for Psychical Research. 1966.
Jim Tucker. "Children Who Claim to Remember Previous Lives: Past, Present, and Future Research." Journal of Scientific Exploration 21, no. 3 (2007), 543 - 552.
Walter Semkiw. Return of the Revolutionaries: The Case for Reincarnation and Soul Groups Reunited. Charlottesville: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2003.
Various Interviews with Walter Semkiw, James Matlock, and Stephen Braude on New Thinking Allowed, with Jeffrey Mishlove: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFk448YbGITLnzplK7jwNcw.
Support new videos on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3375417
Think Anomalous is created by Jason Charbonneau. Illustration by Colin Campbell. Music by Josh Chamberland. Animation by Brendan Barr. Sound design by Will Mountain and Josh Chamberland.
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