Research on children who remember previous lives began around 1960

 Beliefs about reincarnation

Before diving into the evidence, I should remind you that what is documented here is another example of simply following evidence. Reincarnation, for some, is an emotionally charged subject because of existing beliefs. This book aspires to be detached from preconceptions or wishful thinking. I certainly hadn’t heard much about reincarnation before I began my research. It was a completely foreign topic to me that  had no basis in reality, as far as I knew. It was an idea that I assumed people made up to comfort themselves about their mortality.

Lead reincarnation researcher Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia reminded us: “Critics of the evidence for reincarnation have sometimes pointed to its element of hopefulness with the dismissing suggestion that such evidence as we have derives only from wishful thinking. This objection wrongly assumes that what we desire must be false. We might be more easily persuaded to believe what we wish to believe than the contrary; nevertheless, what we wish to believe may be true. Our inquiry into the truth or falseness of an idea should proceed without regard to whether it fortifies or undermines our wishes.”6Children who remember previous lives

Research on children who remember previous lives began around 1960. Then-department head of psychiatry at the University of Virginia (UVA) Medical School, Dr. Ian Stevenson, heard about such children and became intrigued. He then devoted the remainder of his life to this study, examining more than 2,500 cases around the world, until his death in 2007. Dr. Jim Tucker, also a professor at UVA, has continued Dr. Stevenson’s research.

Dr. Stevenson’s work is highly regarded. Dr. Larry Dossey remarks:

[Stevenson] reported thousands of cases of children who remembered past lives and whose descriptions of previous existences checked out on investigation.7…No one else has researched this area with the scholarship, thoroughness, and dogged devotion to detail as he has. Stevenson combed the planet, from back roads of Burma and the remote villages of India to the largest cities on Earth. He devoted decades to scouring every continent except Antarctica, investigating always the same quarry—children who appear to remember a past life. The scope of his work is breathtakingly universal, and even skeptics are generally awed by the thousands of cases he has amassed. The cases occur in every culture including our own and demonstrate strong internal consistency.8

Furthermore, Dr. Stevenson received praise from the well-respected Journal of the American Medical Association in 1975: “In regard to reincarnation [Stevenson] has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases from India, cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds.”9 What did Dr. Stevenson find?

He found common themes in the cases reported all over the world and in different cultures: A child between the ages of two and five begins to speak emotionally of a past life, including specific events (typically traumatic ones) that are clustered around the end of some previous life.10 When a child remembers his or her death, the account described is usually violent.11 Dr. Stevenson stated: “Too often the children are troubled by confusion regarding their identity and this becomes even more severe in those children who, conscious of being in a small body, can remember having been in an adult one, or who remember a life as a member of the opposite sex.”12Dr. Stevenson also noted that age plays a role in a child’s ability to describe and recall past-life memories:

I cannot emphasize too strongly that—with some exceptions—a child who is going to remember a previous life has little more than three years in which to communicate his memories of other persons, and he often has less. Before the age of two or three he lacks the vocabulary and verbal skill with which to express what he may wish to communicate. And from the age of about five on, heavy layers of verbal information cover the images in which his memories appear to be mainly conveyed; amnesia for the memories of a previous life sets in and stops further communication of them.13Often children’s traits can be linked to the previous lives they remember, such as fears, preferences, interests, and skills.14 These traits typically bear no resemblance to those of anyone in the child’s current family. In some cases, the traits make no sense for a young child, such as desiring certain foods that the family doesn’t eat, or desiring “clothes different from those customarily worn by the family members.” Stranger than that are cases in which the child has “cravings for addicting substances, such as tobacco, alcohol or other drugs that the previous personality was known to have used.”15

In some cases, the person allegedly being reincarnated had made a prediction of the next life before his or her death. In other cases, the child has birthmarks, birth defects, or other biological features that align with events of past lives (to be discussed further in the next section).  In a minority of cases, the child exhibits “xenoglossy”: speaking a foreign language he or she hasn’t been taught.16Where possible, Drs. Stevenson and Tucker have looked for historical facts demonstrating that the person the child remembered matches the child’s description. The degree of historical verifiability varies from case to case, but in some cases the accuracy is astounding. In such cases, it is difficult to imagine how a young child could possess such knowledge without access to some broader consciousness.

James 3

One such case is of James Leininger, a young boy in Lafayette, Louisiana.17 When James was 22 months old, his father took him to a museum, and he showed an affinity for the World War II exhibit. Prior to going to the museum, James had been pointing at planes flying overhead, but he became much more interested after the museum visit. So his parents bought him toy planes and a video of the Blue Angels, the Navy’s exhibition team (formed after World War II). James was obsessed and would crash the toy planes into the family’s coffee table, denting and scratching the table while saying, “Airplane crash on fire.” After his second birthday, he began having nightmares several times a week. He thrashed around the bed with his legs in the air, yelling, “Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out!” When awake, he said, “Mama, before I was born, I was a pilot and my airplane got shot in the engine and it crashed in the water, and that’s how I died.” He told his dad the Japanese shot his plane as part of the Iwo Jima operation, that the plane was a Corsair (a plane not at the museum James had visited), which flew off of a boat called the Natoma. He also mentioned that Jack Larsen was there. An additional strange behavior: James was signing his name “James 3.”

James’s parents were confused, so they investigated some of James’s claims. Ultimately, they discovered that James’s description matched the historical facts of the life of James Huston Jr. (i.e., James the second), a pilot on Natoma Bay who had flown a Corsair and was shot down (in another plane) by the Japanese. Huston was the only pilot killed in the Iwo Jima operation, and eyewitnesses reported that the plane was “hit head-on right on the middle of the engine,” after which it crashed in the water and quickly sank. Jack Larsen was the pilot of the plane next to James Huston’s plane.

 The Hollywood extra

Another case is of a four-year-old boy, Ryan, who was born into an Oklahoma family that was traditionally Christian and did not believe in reincarnation.18 When Ryan played, he would often act as though he was directing imaginary movies by saying, “Action!” When he would see the Hollywood Hills on TV, he would say: “That’s my home. That’s where I belong…I just can’t live in these conditions. My last home was much better.”19 He also talked about having traveled the world and loved Chinatown, saying it had the best food. Ryan claimed that he chose his mother before he was born.

Eventually Ryan started having nightmares, waking up saying he was in Hollywood and his heart exploded. Confused, his mother bought Hollywood books to see if they would trigger any memories. In one book, Ryan saw a photograph of six men from a 1932 movie called Night After Night. He said, “Hey, Mama that’s George. We did a picture together. And Mama, that guy’s me. I found me.” Ryan’s mother researched and learned that the man Ryan had identified as George was a movie star in the 1930s/1940s named George Raft. However, Ryan’s parents could not identify the person who Ryan claimed was “him.”

After investigation with the help of Dr. Tucker, they discovered that the man Ryan pointed to was named Marty Martyn, an extra who had no lines in Night After Night. Dr. Tucker tracked down Marty’s daughter, and she and Ryan then met in person. Ryan’s reaction: “Same face, but she didn’t wait on me. She changed. Her energy changed.”20

Many of the claims Ryan had made lined up. For example, Ryan talked of taking girlfriends to the ocean; Marty had taken girlfriends to the ocean and had been married four times. Ryan had remembered an African American maid, and indeed, Marty had one. Ryan mentioned meeting “Senator Five” in New York; Marty’s daughter had a picture of Marty with Senator Ives of New York. Ryan said he was a smoker; Marty smoked cigars. Ryan recalled having a nice home and traveling; Marty had a big house with a swimming pool and traveled the world. Ryan talked about liking the food in Chinatown; Marty had enjoyed a Chinese restaurant in Hollywood. Marty died in a hospital room when he was alone, so it is not known whether a heart attack was the ultimate cause of his death, as Ryan’s nightmares would have suggested.

 As Dr. Tucker summarizes it: “Many of the details Ryan gave did fit the man he pointed to in the picture, who had a much more exciting life than anyone could have guessed a movie extra would have.”21

How could these children know such detailed facts at such a young age with no evidence of exposure to the details they report?

No wonder Carl Sagan thought this was an area deserving “serious study.”

Birthmarks and physical defects

Dr. Stevenson also found links between previous lives and birthmarks and physical defects. His body of work is robust—he wrote a two-volume book entitled Reincarnation and Biology, which is more than 2,000 pages long, with dense scientific text and fine print, covering 200 cases (with photographic evidence).

Amazingly, the birthmarks and physical defects he studied correlate to “previous lives” described by the children he examined. It’s one thing to read summaries of Dr. Stevenson’s work here in this book, but it’s another to see the pictures and detail contained in his literature. In an attempt to simply provide some flavor here, I present several examples out of many.

In some cases, birthmarks correspond to wounds verified by a child’s memories. For example, Dr. Stevenson described a Turkish boy who remembered a previous life in which he was stabbed through the liver area. In this life, the boy had a “large depressed birthmark, really a small cavity in the skin, over his liver.”22 In another example, a boy from Burma had “a small round birthmark in his right lower abdomen and a much larger birthmark on his right back. These correspond to wounds of entry and exit on the bandit whose life he remembered.”23In the strongest cases, medical records verify that the location of a birthmark matches where a trauma occurred in a deceased person. A Lebanese boy recalled a previous life in which he was drinking coffee before leaving for work one day and was shot in the face. The story was verified by an actual shooting that took place. According to medical records related to the shooting, the bullet entered one cheek, damaged the man’s tongue, exited through the other cheek, and the man later died in the hospital. The boy, who claims to be the next incarnation of the murdered man, had birthmarks on each check and had difficulty articulating words that required him to elevate his tongue. Dr. Stevenson reported: “I was able  to study the hospital record in this case. It showed that the birthmark on [the boy’s] left cheek, which was the smaller of the two, corresponded to the wound of entry, and the larger birthmark on the right cheek corresponded to the wound of exit.”24In another case, a Turkish boy was believed to be the next incarnation of a recently deceased relative who died after being shot. The bullet did not exit his head, but the pathologist made an incision to extract the bullet. The Turkish boy was born with a birthmark that corresponded with the location of the incision. Dr. Stevenson commented: “Like many other children of these cases, [the boy] showed powerful attitudes of vengefulness toward the man who had shot [him in the previous life]. He once tried to take his father’s gun and shoot this person, but was fortunately restrained.”25 The boy came to his parents in their dreams, before he was born, saying he would be the next incarnation of this same deceased relative.

It gets even weirder.

Dr. Stevenson examined “experimental” birthmarks: cases in which a mark was left on the body of a deceased person in the hopes that the mark would show on the person who later reincarnates. In a case in Thailand in 1969, a boy’s dead body was marked with charcoal before he was cremated. He had died from drowning. The next boy that the same mother birthed was born with a birthmark near the location of the charcoal marking. Once the boy was able to speak, he began describing details of the life his deceased brother lived. He also had a fear of water.26In another case in Burma, a girl died after unsuccessful open-heart surgery. Her classmates put a mark in red lipstick on the back of her neck before she was buried, in the hopes that the mark would show in the deceased girl’s next incarnation. Thirteen months after the girl’s death, her sister gave birth to a girl who had a “prominent red birthmark at the back of her neck in the same location where [the deceased girl’s] schoolmates marked her with lipstick” [emphasis in original]. Dr. Stevenson commented that she also had a birthmark that appeared as a thin line with “diminished pigmentation that ran vertically from her lower chest to her upper abdomen. This corresponded to the surgical incision for the cardiac surgery during which [the girl] had died.”27

In other cases, more extreme physical deformities can be linked to traumas experienced by the previous life remembered by the child. A Burmese girl was born with birthmarks near her heart and on her head; she was missing  the fifth finger on her left hand, and she had “constriction rings” on her legs, the most dramatic of which was on her left thigh.28 In the disturbing picture provided by Dr. Stevenson in Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (shown below), her leg looks as though it had been constricted by something like a rope. But her leg is naturally shaped that way, without anything constricting it. It is by no means the typical shape of a leg. When the girl was able to speak, she identified herself as a man who had been tortured (fingers cut, tied in ropes). Dr. Stevenson was eventually able to verify this man’s identity. There was indeed a person tortured and killed in the precise manner described by the little girl. Distressed by her birthmarks and deformities, the little girl said, “Grandpa. Look at what they did to me. How cruel they were.”29How could she have known such specific details? Why would a young child be saying these things? Why did her body reflect such distinctive deformities that matched the way the man had died?

Dr. Ian Stevenson investigated the case of a young girl who had specific, distinctive deformities that match how she described dying in a past life (shown above). In fact, there was a person who died in the precise manner described by the little girl. She described being tied in ropes and tortured in her past life. The shape of her legs seems to match that description. The figure above is from Dr. Stevenson’s bookWhere Reincarnation and Biology Intersect(1997).

 Dr. Stevenson noted that the girl’s mother happened to have walked past the tortured man’s dead body when she was two and a half months pregnant. She saw the police handling the situation. She believes the same man came to her in a dream before her daughter was born.30 Was this little girl the next incarnation of the man who was tortured—even though this man had no biological relationship to the little girl?

Maternal impressions

Dr. Stevenson conceded that in some cases it is not fully clear that birth defects can be tied directly to a previous life. Instead, “maternal impressions” sometimes could have been the cause. Maternal impressions refer to frightening mental images that the mother of a baby has during pregnancy, which result in the baby’s having a deformity that closely matches the mental image. Dr. Stevenson referenced an 1890 study at the University of Virginia written by a pediatrician who reviewed 90 maternal-impression cases. In these cases, the mother experienced something particularly frightening during pregnancy. And in 77 percent of the cases, there was “‘quite a close correspondence’ between the impression upon the mother during pregnancy and her baby’s defect.”31

Dr. Stevenson researched this topic further and focused on 300 cases from around the world, of which he studied 50 in detail. The example that Dr. Stevenson pointed to is disturbing, but makes the point. He recalled the case of a woman whose brother’s penis was amputated for medical reasons. While pregnant, “her curiosity impelled her to have a look at the site of her brother’s amputation.”32 She then gave birth to a male baby without a penis. Dr. Stevenson researched medical records of the general population and found the odds of a male baby being born with this birth defect is one in 30 million.

Dr. Stevenson’s analysis of the cases revealed that maternal impressions most likely impacted the baby when the impression occurred during the first trimester of pregnancy and when the traumatic incident occurred to the mother or someone close to her.33 Examples such as this caused Dr. Stevenson to question whether every case of physical deformity was induced by reincarnation. Instead, it is possible that some cases could be attributed to maternal impressions (which on its own deserves investigation!).

 But Dr. Stevenson noted that sometimes the mother had no knowledge of a deformity during pregnancy. In those cases, the maternal-impressions explanation doesn’t hold, and something else (reincarnation?) is needed as an explanation.34

Where does this leave us?

The totality of Drs. Stevenson’s and Tucker’s work points in the following direction, as summarized by Dr. Stevenson: “Some persons have unique attributes that we cannot now explain satisfactorily as due solely to a combination of genetic variation and environmental influences. Reincarnation deserves consideration as a third factor in play.”35 If this is true, the implications are immense for science, medicine, and beyond (as we’ll explore in chapter 13).

Under the materialist view that the brain produces consciousness, reincarnation is “nonsense.” However, if consciousness is more fundamental than matter and does not arise from brain activity, then the evidence discussed in this chapter is truly plausible.

Chapter Summary

❍Drs. Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker of the University of Virginia have studied more than 2,500 children over 50-plus years who claim to remember previous lives.

❍Sometimes the stories these young children tell match historical records of the individuals they claim they were in past lives. In other cases, the children speak foreign languages that they had no way of knowing.

❍In some cases, the child has distinctive birthmarks or physical deformities that match the way in which the child describes having died in a previous life. Sometimes, medical records verified the accuracy of the child’s claims.

An End to Upside Down Thinking

Dispelling the Myth That the Brain ProducesC onsciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life

Mark Gober