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Reincarnation research
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Reincarnation research is a field of inquiry that records and analyzes the discourse of people who claim to have had past lives. The field is roughly divided into two components: researchers and therapists.
University of Virginia researchers Professor Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim Tucker have published many books and peer-reviewed research papers about their work examining children's recollections. Typically, these researchers collected records of young children who claim to remember a past life and described the events of that life.
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Encyclopedia
Reincarnation research is a field of inquiry that records and analyzes the discourse of people who claim to have had past lives. The field is roughly divided into two components: researchers and therapists.
University of Virginia researchers Professor Ian Stevenson and Dr. Jim Tucker have published many books and peer-reviewed research papers about their work examining children's recollections. Typically, these researchers collected records of young children who claim to remember a past life and described the events of that life. The child will usually begin talking about this at about three years of age, and will forget about it by age seven. Professor Stevenson has also compared birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased.
Peter Ramster, a psychotherapist, has used trance and hypnosis that induced a number of patients to make claims about past lives. The most suggestive case of all, according to Ramster, is Gwen McDonald who said she was Rose Duncan in Somerset, England, at the end of the 18th century. However, Ramster's research has almost completely been ignored by the scientific community, and there are concerns about the validity of past life regression therapy.
Skeptics suggest that reincarnation research and therapy provide no objective proof for reincarnation and that claims of past lives originate from selective thinking, confabulation, and the psychological phenomenon of false memories.
Research on early childhood memories and birthmarks
Reincarnation researchers collect records of young children who claim to remember a previous life and describe the events and the people that they recall. Typically, the child will begin talking about these memories near three years of age, and loses them by age seven. In some cases these memories corroborate with actual people and events. If scientists can interview these children before contact is made with people familiar with the supposed previous family, then a comparison can be made between the statements made by the child and the people they describe.
University of Virginia
University of Virginia psychiatrists Dr. Jim Tucker and Professor Ian Stevenson have published books and peer-reviewed research papers about their work in examining cases of early childhood memories and birthmarks. The most detailed collections of personal reports in favor of reincarnation have been published by Professor Ian Stevenson, in books such as Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. In 1977, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases devoted most of one issue to Stevenson's work and the journal's editor described Stevenson as "a methodical, careful, even cautious investigator."
Stevenson has spent over 40 years devoted to the study of children who have spoken about putative past lives. In each case, Stevenson methodically documents the child's statements. Then, he attempts to identify the deceased person the child identifies with, and where possible verifies the facts of the deceased person's life that match the child's memory.
In a fairly typical case, a boy in Beirut spoke of being a 25-year-old mechanic, thrown to his death from a speeding car on a beach road. According to several witnesses, the boy provided the driver's name, the exact location of the crash, the names of the mechanic's sisters and parents and cousins, and the people he went hunting with. These all matched the life of a man who had died several years before the boy was born, and who had no apparent connection to the boy's family.
Another case involved an Indian boy, Gopal, who at the age of three started talking about life in the city of Mathura, 160 miles (260 km) from his home in Delhi. He claimed that he had owned a medical company called Sukh Shancharak, lived in a large house with many servants, and that his brother had shot him after a quarrel. Subsequent investigations revealed that, some eight years before Gopal's birth, one of the owners of Sukh Shancharak had shot his brother. The deceased man was called Shaktipal Shara. Gopal was subsequently invited to Mathura by Shaktipal's family, where the young child identified various people and places known to Shaktipal.
During interviews and when reviewing documents, Professor Stevenson searched for alternate ways to account for the testimony given: that the child came upon the information in some normal way, that the witnesses were deluded or engaged in fraud, that the correlations were the result of coincidence or misunderstanding. But in many cases, Stevenson concluded that no normal explanation sufficed.
Stevenson believes that his meticulous methods rule out all possible "normal" explanations for the child’s memories. However, it should be noted that a significant proportion of the University of Virginia's reported cases of reincarnation originate in Eastern societies, where dominant religions often permit the concept of reincarnation. In India – where this phenomenon is quite common – if a child from a poor family claims to be the reincarnated person from a rich family, this can lead to the child to be adopted by that family, a motive that has led to children making fraudulent reincarnation claims. But this can't explain all the cases. In Carol Bowman's book Children's Past Lives it is said, referring to Stevenson's research, that
some children who remember being from a lower caste than their parents may display the coarseness and survival instincts of the desperately poor and habits offensive to the new family. Some are grateful for their improved station and show great pleasure in eating good food and owning nice clothes. One girl who was born a Brahmin – the highest caste in India – remembered the life of a sweeper from the lowest or "untouchable" class. An otherwise sweet girl, she horrified her family with her repulsive habits and by her repeated requests for pork (the family was vegetarian). ... [and] unlike the others members of the family, she willingly – almost eagerly – cleaned up the excrements of younger children.
Stevenson has said about the 2500 cases of children who appeared to remember past lives, which he and his associates investigated:
My conclusion so far is that reincarnation is not the only explanation for these cases, but that it is the best explanation we have for the stronger cases, by which I mean those in which a child makes a considerable number (say 20 or 30) of correct statements about another person who lives in a family that lives quite remote from his own and with which his family has had no prior contacts. When we talk about remoteness, we don't necessarily just mean physical distance. We know that two families can live only 10 kilometers apart and yet they can be very remote because they belong to different economic and social classes.
Professor Stevenson has also matched birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records such as autopsy photographs. Stevenson's research into birthmarks and congenital defects has particular importance, since it furnishes graphic evidence suggestive of reincarnation, superior to the (often fragmentary) memories and reports of the children and adults questioned, which even if verified afterwards probably cannot be assigned the same value in scientific terms. Many of the birthmarks are not just small discolourations. They are "often unusual in shape or size and are often puckered or raised rather than simply being flat. Some can be quite dramatic and unusual in appearance."
Research based on hypnotic regression
The second major field of research requires the direct intervention of the researcher, who places subjects in a hypnotic trance in order to elicit past life stories. The advantage of this procedure is that almost anyone can provide testimony about reincarnation, not just the rare children who speak of past lives. The disadvantages of the procedure are that, first, the testimony of subjects is immediately suspect, because hypnosis is known to sometimes produce false memories, and second, that the events described are invariably so long ago, so patchily described, and so poorly documented in the historical record that no objective comparison can be made between the events described and actual events. Nevertheless, because so many hypnotic subjects spontaneously remember past lives, some psychologists have become convinced of the legitimacy of the phenomenon.
Peter Ramster
Peter Ramster, a psychotherapist based in Sydney, has used trance and hypnosis that induced a number of patients to make claims about past lives. Four of these patients, housewives who had never left Australia and who, under trance, had come up with all sorts of details, and names of people and places, were taken to Western European countries where they said they had been living in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Prior to their arrival in 1981, Ramster and local historians searched archives, looking for and finding the names given in Australia. Similarly, villages and hamlets mentioned under hypnosis were found on old maps. Some of these settlements no longer existed, yet some names given turned out to be correct.
The most convincing case of all, according to Ramster, is that of Gwen McDonald, who said she had been Rose Duncan in Somerset, England, at the end of the 18th century. Under hypnosis in Sydney she described various details in England that appeared correct when subsequently researched: the location of stepping stones, the location of houses that no longer exist, names of villages and people—all of which were found back in historical records. Ramster writes: "Short of some other explanation to the contrary, I have personally come to believe in the truth of both life after death and reincarnation." The investigation of the McDonald case was witnessed throughout by Dr. Basil Cottle of Bristol University and a 90-minute television documentary describing Ramster's 1981 investigation was made.
Ramster's research has almost completely been ignored by the scientific community. Scientists such as Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker have some concerns about past life regression therapy.
Skeptical reactions
The most obvious objection to reincarnation is that there is no evidence of a physical process by which a personality could survive death and travel to another body, and researchers such as Professor Stevenson recognize this limitation. Another fundamental objection is that most people simply do not remember previous lives, although it is possible that only some, but not all, people reincarnate, or that the conditions necessary for remembering a past life are specific enough to narrow the population which can do this. For instance, the vast majority of cases investigated at the University of Virginia involved people who had met some sort of violent or untimely death.
Skeptics suggest that claims of reincarnation originate from selective thinking, confabulation, and the psychological phenomena of false memories. At least the first of these three claims has not been proved broadly among those who remember past lives. The second concern, the possibility of confabulation (by the children, their parents/relatives, or the researcher), is a scenario that is difficult to disprove. Skeptics note that many of the reincarnation research studies are based on anecdotal evidence provided by the child or family, and also note that it is difficult to prove or disprove the veracity of anecdotal claim.
The evidence for skeptical objections, such as those made by Paul Edwards and Richard Rockley, who have analyzed many of Stevenson's accounts, remains below the level of peer-reviewed scientific journals. Rockley's article raises concerns such as cultural belief in reincarnation having been present in some of Stevenson's cases. This is a fair criticism, though it should also be considered that cultural disbelief in a studied phenomenon functions as tacit suppression; the Philosopher Robert Almeder, having analyzed the criticisms of Edwards and others, say that the gist of these criticisms can be summarized as "we all know it can't possibly be real, so therefore it isn't real".
The fallibility of memory
It is common experience that human memory may be unreliable to some degree, whether by failing to remember at all or by remembering incorrectly. Confabulated evidence presented by children in police cases such as the Kern County child abuse scare and McMartin preschool trial could cast some doubt on the reliability of claims children might make with regards to reincarnation.
Stevenson argued that fallibility of memories is mitigated where birthmarks and birth defects are matched to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records such as autopsy photographs, and increases confidence in the accuracy of informants' memories concerning them.
Dr. Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan was a noted scientist, teacher and skeptic. Sagan was a founding member of a group that set out to debunk unscientific claims, and wrote the book The Demon-Haunted World in which he said that there were several areas in parapsychology which deserved serious study:
At the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study: (1) that by thought alone humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computers; (2) that people under mild sensory deprivation can receive thoughts or images "projected" at them; and (3) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any way other than reincarnation. I pick these claims not because I think they're likely to be valid (I don't), but as examples of contentions that might be true.
See also
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