VIDEO: Research on Reincarnation

There are many religions that strongly believe in the concept of reincarnation, but could it actually be real?

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On one hand, we would love to live forever, but on the other hand… we would absolutely hate it! It would be awful to be immortal and to have to watch everyone we love grow old and die, eventually.

But reincarnation… Well, that’s something else. And it has been studied!

According to Wikipedia, psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, from the University of Virginia, investigated many reports of young children who claimed to remember a past life. He conducted more than 2,500 case studies over a period of 40 years and published twelve books, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.

Stevenson methodically documented each child’s statements and then identified the deceased person the child identified with, and verified the facts of the deceased person’s life that matched the child’s memory. He also matched birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records such as autopsy photographs, in Reincarnation and Biology.

Stevenson searched for disconfirming evidence and alternative explanations for the reports, and believed that his strict methods ruled out all possible “normal” explanations for the child’s memories.

However, a significant majority of Stevenson’s reported cases of reincarnation originated in Eastern societies, where dominant religions often permit the concept of reincarnation. Following this type of criticism, Stevenson published a book on European Cases of the Reincarnation Type.

Skeptics such as Paul Edwards have analyzed many of these accounts, and called them anecdotal, while also suggesting that claims of evidence for reincarnation originate from selective thinking and from the false memories that often result from one’s own belief system and basic fears, and thus cannot be counted as empirical evidence.

Carl Sagan referred to examples apparently from Stevenson’s investigations in his book The Demon-Haunted World as an example of carefully collected empirical data, though he rejected reincarnation as a parsimonious explanation for the stories.

Sam Harris cited Stevenson’s works in his book The End of Faith as part of a body of data that seems to attest to the reality of psychic phenomena.

Stevenson claimed there were a handful of cases that suggested evidence of xenoglossy. These included two where a subject under hypnosis could allegedly converse with people speaking the foreign language, instead of merely being able to recite foreign words.

Sarah Thomason, a linguist at the University of Michigan, reanalyzed these cases, concluding that “the linguistic evidence is too weak to provide support for the claims of xenoglossy.”

Ian Wilson argued that a large number of Stevenson’s cases consisted of poor children remembering wealthy lives or belonging to a higher caste. He speculated that such cases may represent a scheme to obtain money from the family of the alleged former incarnation.

The philosopher Keith Augustine has written “the vast majority of Stevenson’s cases come from countries where a religious belief in reincarnation is strong, and rarely elsewhere, seems to indicate that cultural conditioning generates claims of spontaneous past-life memories.”