The Science of Souls

What if I told you that reincarnation is a real scientific subject of study?

Not too long ago, I read a book by Jim. B. Tucker called Return to Life in which he recounted his work, first under Ian Stevenson who died in 2007, and then on his own, to get to the bottom of why so many young children seemed to know things it was impossible for them to know about a past life they insisted they had lived.

Tucker would try to see if he could find a deceased person whose life and/or name matched the one the kid was describing and see how the rest of the information lined up. This was information no one would know, least of all a two-year-old. He would show them pictures of people and see if they could weed out which ones the deceased had known in life, and he would even bring them to the place of their previous life in order to potentially jog more memories.

It’s strange to me how scientists will openly conjecture that we might actually be living in a simulation, or some sci-fi-esque theory like that, but you hardly ever hear about past lives. People here in the west like to hear there’s life after death, but only one. Somehow the thought of multiple lives makes them leery, or maybe just tired. Any way you slice it, mainstream journals tend to stay away from this stuff, despite it not being really any more wacky than anything else quantum physics throws at us.

So I’m going to buckle down and do my part for the people, at least here on Vocal. Here are some fun (if mildly freaky) facts about the phenomenon scientists like Stevenson and Tucker have given their lives to studying:

* The vast majority of people who display mysterious knowledge of past lives tend to be two or three when they start talking about the other life (so, usually way too early for them to have gleaned their mysterious knowledge from anywhere else). Most of them also seem to either stop talking about the memories or even slowly forget as they get to be around 7 or 8.

* Upon studying these cases, tests were performed on the children and their families to see if dissociative issues might be an influential factor to their credibility. Most of the children scored unexpectedly low (aka. very grounded and not prone to fantasy) on this scale.

* Only about 1/4 of the kids in Tucker’s studies showed any other ‘psychic’ abilities, which makes it very unlikely that this phenomenon could be explained away as kids with ESP picking up on knowledge of deceased people at random.

* Some people have remembered more than one past life, though this is uncommon. Such was suspected to be the case with one boy, who remembered down to the details a home on Barra Island, Scotland. He remembered the last name of the family who had lived there, and even what their dog looked like, but he also remembered a father who died being hit by a car when crossing the street. There was no proof of this last thing happening, but the accuracy of everything else led Tucker to wonder if he was not lying about the whole thing, but maybe confusing two previous lives, mashing them together in his subconscious.

* There is a trend where people come back to be reborn in the same family when that family is one they have unresolved issues or a premature ending with.

* It’s not uncommon for the suspected reincarnated child to have birthmarks on them that resemble marks on the original person, often mimicking the marks they bore at death. Apparently, Dr. Tucker studied about 200 cases like this, the most interesting of which was that of a boy born with the same physical symptoms the deceased older brother he’d never met had displayed, down to a limp and a blind eye despite not suffering from the same illnesses.

* You apparently don’t need to have just been born to find someone’s consciousness taking up residence in you. One boy’s uncle died and came back for a series of weeks to inhabit the boy’s body. During that time, he gained five new ‘birthmarks’ that matched the late uncle’s tattoo, started referring to his grandparents as mom and dad, and developed a taste for whiskey- all of which faded back to normal in time. Why does this sound like a benign possession?

* Speaking of: one woman appeared to be possessed when at the age of 32, she started communicating fluently in a language she had never learned and simultaneously lost her ability to speak the language she’d been raised with. She could describe the life of another woman who’d lived more than 150 years ago in detail, and for years after she would shift between this woman’s persona and her original persona, language and all. Makes me wonder whether Multiple Personalities are sometimes literally souls battling for dominance. Sounds like a hell of a fantasy story, doesn’t it?

* In a rare instance, a child named Ryan literally pointed out his past self in an old picture, saying ‘That’s me.” The picture wasn’t of anyone well-known, so it took a while for researchers to find out who it was - an extra in a Hollywood movie named Marty Martyn. When they found Marty’s identity, they contacted his daughter, who was still living, and found out that the information Ryan had given them was all accurate. This included things like the color of Marty’s car, his hobbies, the name of his street, the pets he’d owned, and even the status of his family relationships.

* A lot of the people, after meeting the descendants of their past selves, or traveling to the place they supposedly used to live, would grow distant and a little sad, possibly because they realized time had moved on without them and things had changed. However, the kids were also often able to stop obsessing over the past life once they had this closure and realized their old family wasn’t somewhere waiting for them.

* Sometimes hobbies or a prodigious gift seem to trail over from a past life, like in the case of the boy who claimed to be golf legend Bobby Jones reincarnated. He started excelling at the sport himself around age 2.

* The time most remembered seems to be the years closest to death, so unless they died young, most reincarnated kids remember their past self’s adult life more than their life as a child.

* The thing that sticks the most is trauma. Many of the kids who remember past lives died in a way that was either traumatic or unnatural. Sometimes they even seem to be dealing with PTSD in regards to whatever they associate with their death. This was the case with James Leininger, who retained the memories and the nightmares of a pilot whose plane was shot down in World War II. Among other things, this kid knew more about airplane models he’d never seen than could be explained away.

* More boys remember past lives than girls. There seems to be a direct link between this and the unusual manner of death, as men are statistically more likely than women to die in an unnatural way due to risk-taking or dangerous lines of work. This was doubly true in the past. In a similar vein, usually a person seems to retain the same gender identity across lives.

* Yeah, if your kid starts to talk about a previous life, most of the time it’s probably nothing. But it’s worth mentioning that most of the parents in these cases noticed a significant difference between the way their kids talked about the past life (matter-of-factly and consistently) vs. the way they talked when playing pretend (excitedly and fancifully).

* The likelihood of someone you know remembering having memories of a past life at some point is higher than you might think. It’s just that in the US, most people do not believe in this kind of thing and so don’t end up telling anyone about it. They don’t want to be made fun of or thought to be crazy. Your neighbor or friend could be holding out on you. Hell, maybe I am.

Conclusion: The world is really, really weird. But it’s definitely not boring, and reality is anything but predictable. It does make me wonder how anybody could think nothing exists beyond our limited perception- or how anyone thinks they have all the answers about exactly what does.

Enjoyed this article? Please consider leaving a like or a tip to let me know! Also definitely check out Tucker’s book if you’d like to go deeper & really delve into the scientific theory behind how this could all be possible. Thanks for reading! : )