Jim Tucker || The Science of Reincarnation

but if it's true that the physical grows out of the mental essentially then i don't see why an individual consciousness would be dependent on a physical brain because in fact the physical world is growing out of consciousness [Music] hello and welcome to the psychology podcast today we welcome dr jim tucker on the show dr jim tucker is a child psychiatrist and the bonner lowry professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the university of virginia he is director of the uva division of perceptual studies where he is continuing the work of dr ian stevenson on reincarnation he's been invited to speak about his research on good morning america larry king live and cbs sunday morning and he recently published the book called before children's memories of previous lives a two-in-one edition of his previous books this is a really fascinating episode folks in this episode i talked to dr jim tucker about the science of reincarnation yes there is a science behind this we delve into his research findings and methodology on children who claim to remember their prior lives dr tucker notes that these children don't just recall biological details of their past but they also retain feelings and emotions his findings have important implications for how we understand consciousness we also touch on the topics of morality trauma quantum physics and pans psychism the implications of this really run deep and while there's still a lot of questions that remain i had a lot of fun chatting with dr tucker about what's possible i hope you enjoy this episode just as much as i do so now i bring you dr jim tucker really nice to meet you yeah nice to meet you i am utterly fascinated with your work and don't know why it's not more mainstream quite frankly there's so many implications of it for so many areas of cognitive science that i study um and it runs deep to consciousness issues of consciousness issues of um even uh free will you know so there's so much to discuss well that's right but yeah it's not more mainstream because it challenges a lot of the uh sort of mainstream assumptions so it's easy for people to ignore it yeah so before we jump into the deep end i wanted to get a sense of some of your biggest influences i do get the sense that dr ian stevenson uh played a huge role in in your work and even to the extent that you're kind of carrying the baton like i like to think i'm carrying the baton from abraham maslow you're carrying the baton from dr ian stevenson so can you talk a little about his work and uh and uh the work he initiated in like 1958 i believe right so yeah he came to uva in the late 50s to be chairman of the department of psychiatry and and had never done any had he had an interest in parapsychology but he had never done any um and he was still in his late 30s when he came here to be chair and he was having quite a successful mainstream career mostly or much of it looking at psychosomatic kinds of things um but then he got intrigued by this phenomenon of young children in different parts of the world who said that they had memories of a past life and he started trying to investigate those cases and find out exactly what the child said and and whether they in fact matched a life from the past his work ian um once said on the obsessive compulsive scale one to ten he was an eleven and he liked to get all the details right so he was he was very methodical in uh studying these cases and eventually stepped down as chairman of the department to focus full time on them and and then spend the bulk of the next few decades uh studying these cases and then we've continued to do that so dr ian stevenson yeah so that's that's interesting i didn't know that he he would score high in uh ocd so he was really do you get the sense from from reading his writings that he really wasn't biased to a certain conclusion that he really wanted to amass as much evidence as possible to before he made up his mind you know i don't even know if he ever made up his mind completely but yeah do you get that sense that he really wanted to get as much data as possible yeah he um i mean he's basically trying to determine for himself so yeah as we all are i mean we were research questions or ones that were questioning um in his case he had become persuaded that the strongest cases that that reincarnation was the best explanation for them but not the only uh so he certainly left that door open that he could be wrong about it but he was persuaded that you know there was people no longer had to accept reincarnation on faith they could accept it on evidence if they chose to well he coined the term psycho for right yeah p-s-y-c-h-o-p-h-o-r-e soul bearing what was his thought about that why did he find the need to coin such a term well right so he was his idea was that if he had these uh memories and emotions and behavioral characteristics in a life that if they continued on into another life as as these cases appeared to suggest then there would have to be some sort of vehicle to carry them so rather than use a term like soul or spirit you know some sort of religious term he felt that he should coin a new term that that didn't have connotations that were not necessarily consistent with the workers certainly not consistent with the attempt to look at this in sort of a serious objective way as opposed to a religious way um yeah yeah because even just people listening to this conversation even they're like oh they're talking about reincarnation reincarnation it might be hard for people to even have a model in their head that one can discuss this in a scientific way so we're gonna let's change some people's minds here today in the sense that we can show them that we can have this discussion in a in a in a way that is evidence-based uh and so doc what i find interesting is dr stevens he has this quote rear reincarnation is the best even though not the only explanation for the stronger cases we have investigated that was the the quote that that got to the closest when i wanted to know what his conclusion was and you're not ian stevens you're your own human so um as a jumping point from that i want to you know continue the rest of this conversation today on what you've discovered and what you've concluded uh maybe have similarly end differently from dr ian stevenson even though he was a huge mentor of yours so you kind of popped on the scene in 1996 on the reincarnation scene you reincarnated in 1996 you were right you left your private practice in psychiatry to go all in on this so this was this was this was a motivation like you there was a moment like a howard gardner calls it a crystallizing experience right where you're like this is it this is what i want to do with my life moving forward um so how did that happen yeah it was a real fork in the road that for sure um and i think i mean to back up for a step it basically did the big fork in the road when my wife and i got together it opened me up to um i mean to be frank experiencing life in sort of a different way a more fuller way or a fuller way and um she was open to these kinds of things in a way that i had not been so that got me intrigued so i was reading about different things and it's actually reading one of the in season's books uh we learned that his research division here at the university of virginia had gotten a grant to do a new study on near-death experiences not reincarnation but new death experiences uh so i just called them up to see if they needed help with that study and it's sort of one thing led to another um but when i left my private practice to come on here i have continued to be a child psychiatrist so about half of my time roughly is spent doing clinical work patient care work uh helping to train the residents and the fellows so it's not like i left it all behind but i did decide that i was going to do the work that i wanted to do and you know if it didn't work out i could always go back into private practice but but in the meantime i was going to explore this area again i mean the question of life after death is something that you know interests all of us at least to some extent but what really appealed to me was the um serious-minded sort of uh scientific approach evidence-based approach that that was going on uh at uva and that i wanted to be a part of yeah i mean it must have also felt a little bit like a rebel right like there must be some bone in your body that like you know maybe like just a personality trait maybe you've had your whole life or you like you know like i'm gonna you know take on the establishment a little bit uh yeah actually i'm quite the opposite um fascinating fascinating pretty much a straight arrow rule follower kind of person um so yeah it was a step out of my comfort zone but but again the approach is mainstream i mean it's looking it's true it's looking at a topic that people don't usually apply these methods to but it's the same end goal of seeing what we can seeing what we can discover yeah i mean i bet you see all sorts of explanations for things that that make you roll your eyes you know like that are just so outside of the evidence base and you're like well you know i i don't i don't think that even suggests that's true at all but here's a fact a fascinating fact some young children say they have been here before okay that's the fact now what derives from that well lots of things um can be investigated to try to understand that and the me and and you'll probably always get asked what's the mechanism what's the right and there's all sorts of explanations i would like to go through in a systematic way um and discuss um first of all the main characteristics that you see um and we'll go through it i have the list and then i also when discussing the potential explanations for it and then i want to end with your your thoughts on what's what's what's going on based on the totality of the evidence so one thing you often see are uh just the most simplest most conceptually associated with with this idea which is which are past life statements right so these kids um usually between the ages of two and five talk about um a someone else's whole life right and they seem to have memories of it right so can you elucidate a little bit what exactly the nature of that looks like yeah it's very much memory in the sense that it's from one person's point of view they're not just spelling facts but more of what to them feel like memories and often focused on the end of the life so uh three quarters of the kids talk about how they died in the past life they remember the death and um most of those are some sort of violent death or unnatural death anyway murder suicide accident combat that sort of thing and with those sort of traumatic memories uh can come other memories too about family they they may express a lot of emotional attachment toward previous parents that they may tell their parents you're not really my parents my parents lived in such and such place and they at times will give enough specific details which pretty much have to include names of places or names of people but give enough where people then verify that that their apparent memories do in fact match a life from the past a lot of them will also show a lot of emotions um i mentioned that the attachment to the previous family many of them will show phobias toward the mode of death uh the previous person had it the kids may act out various aspects of the past life in their play so it you know again it's not just information that they seem to be connecting to or that seems to have carried on but but the whole that feelings and emotions have have carried on as well it seems these kids do this spontaneously it doesn't involve hypnotic regression or anything like that and they they come from all over the world that we've studied over 2500 cases and while they're easiest to find in cultures with the general belief in reincarnation they happen everywhere so it's it's with the american cases most of the parents did not believe in in past lives before their kids started talking about one so it's not like anyone created this for or led them uh to believe these things it's just something that arises from them uh that they have these emotional memories that they describe great and few of them are famous people um so there's uh there it's not like they're really prominent cases would you say that the 100 of these cases can't be explained away by somehow the kid find a news article you know somewhere or watching something on television about about a really violent death of someone can you say that you have investigated that systematically and 100 cases can't be explained away by that well i wouldn't necessarily say 100 for anything but it but in the strongest cases for instance some of the kids will talk about either a deceased family member or a deceased person from the same town or village so those you know you always wondered did they learn about the previous person right by natural means but with the stranger cases i mean there where they remember being a stranger there are plenty of those where it's essentially inconceivable that they learned about this stuff through normal means now there may be other explanations for the cases but not that they somehow read a news article about this person who lived 50 years before and that you know died in in um um without anyone knowing about them and that that's just not a a reasonable explanation for most of them fascinating and you know children have wild imaginations right um and you have enough people on earth you know i could i bet i could imagine something right now and then statistically it probably would match up to some you know i could make up something right now be like um i'm johnny uh i'm johnny who um uh died of uh a bullet to the head in the war i bet there was someone named johnny who died with a bullet head of the war so just it just statistically now do you think that can fully explain it is a rich rich imagination that just happens to match um a prior life well it depends on the statement so yeah like you said or you know if someone says i was bob and i was killed in a car accident in california all right well they're going to be a lot right um so you have to look at how the specificity of the statements so there are longer where it can only fit one person wow so yeah there's a well-known american case of a kid who talked about being a world war ii pilot uh who was shot in the pacific and gave the name of of the aircraft carrier first and last name of a friend of his describes where he died described how he died and there was only one person in history whose life matched those details so you know you could say it's a coincidence but that i don't think it's plausible i mean that that would be one heck of a coincidence yeah one heck of a coincidence and you tend to find that these individuals come from not necessarily the person's bloodline but a certain vicinity to where they live right you don't tend to have prior lives of someone on the other end of the world that's true although we do occasionally get those reports and you know if a child if an american child says my last life was in africa well i mean there's no way to verify that without a whole lot more details uh but with the ones that do have verifiable details um even the ones who describe past life as a member of um another country there is often a geographical connection so for instance burmese children who said they were japanese soldiers killed in burma during world war ii um so right most of them are not related they're not uh describing the life of an ancestor so there's not a genetic connection but there is um it is for intact memories to come through typically the past life was one that was reasonably close by usually in the same country and then you also tend to see some past life behaviors like unusual play among these children um can you kind of elaborate what you see there yeah the most common is actually acting out the previous occupation um so i mean not just playing war like all kids do but specific things like a kid who played repeatedly for hours on end at being a biscuit and soda shopkeeper uh which the previous person had done some of them will sh will kind of reenact the death scene uh over and over that's not as common as the occupation but we do have some of those cases um but but sometimes the occupation ones are quite um precise as well uh so there's this kid who remembered being a night club owner and would even put out seats for his two wives and it turned out that the person was somebody who fit that kind of description um so just taken on its own the play may not necessarily be that impressive but when you put it in with the whole picture then then it looks like it is connected to the memories that's a great point and i i should have stepped back and asked about your methodology because it is true that when you collect these reports you tend to uh further investigate ones that show two out of a list of behaviors that there are multiple these things um that when i was reading into your methodology is that correct yeah right yeah there are a number of features that we look for the most obvious is um claiming to remember past life but then yeah their behaviors that are associated appear associated with the memories there are these are not common but there are cases where the previous person made a prediction about where they would be born the next time around they're also what we call announcing dreams where usually the mom when she's pregnant will have a dream about a previous person saying i'm coming to be born to you um and it seems like there are one or two other features that that make the list for you we have to have at least two of those to register it in our cases oh birthmarks and birth defects that met i was going to bring that up yeah on the previous person uh so the most common are the statements and the behaviors but um we get the others as well i was i thought that was interesting that like in india where reincarnation is a uh idea that's in the in the in the consciousness there of of the culture a third of your cases from india include birthmarks or birth defects that are thought to correspond to wounds on the previous personalities with 18 of those including medical records that confirm the match oh my gosh what do you think's going on with the birthmarks yeah well i will say like the child intentionally branded himself right uh yeah no i think we've ruled that out but i will say the percentage is a little bit misleading in the sense that ian stevenson um was really fascinated by those cases so those that would affect which ones he would fully investigate but but yes there are plenty of those cases out there and yes it's ones where the child is born with with a birthmark or full birth defects that match wounds usually the fatal wounds on the body of the previous person um and they include like 18 cases where they have both entrance and exit wounds of somebody who was a gunshot victim um deformities like there was a case of a little boy who um the previous story lost the fingers of his right hand in the fought our chopping machine and and then the second bar has been born with missing fingers on his right hand uh and there are a lot of those speakers out there um we get some american ones like that as well that they're not as common here uh but we've certainly had ones including a one with heart defect um others with birth hearts uh so yeah they're there it seems that if i mean if we accept the cases there if there is a sort of carryover of mind or consciousness that sometimes traumatic either memories or even traumatic wounds uh can affect the developing fetus in the way that they show up in the behavior yeah you talk about that in the in your in one of your books about the fascinating nature of how our mind can affect our bodies you know how these things are intertwined and uh maybe the consciousness uh creates the the birth marks but it you know makes one question you know where do birthmarks come from in any of us like i have marks right like why do i have birth marks what's what's the developmental explanation for that would a would a biologist be able to explain that to me well i think most of them did the cause is unknown um i mean not that i'm an expert on personalities but there you know there are some birth defects in particular where there's a syndrome that's been identified but but for most of them it's unknown and you know it's not necessarily a ton of research on birth marks because they're using right benign um and and ian never claimed that all birthmarks were related to past lives but just that in some of these i know but but i it makes me wonder yeah dr dr tucker i have a confession uh when i was three years old or so we were in disneyland and uh we were i still remember this vividly i remember this vividly we were in disneyland and uh we were at the hotel afterwards and i went into the bathroom and i remember i was standing in front of the toilet and suddenly i saw i was like an old man in my head and i saw my whole life uh my whole life flashed before my eyes like i saw like like suddenly like i wasn't three-year-old scott i was literally like a mature old man with like and all the things that come along with that like i had lots of mature thoughts like the three-year-old you know wouldn't tend to have and it freaked me out and so much so that i remember this moment even even today um and i uh but it just disappeared it just disappeared when i like walked back into the room it was just this like moment um where i just i was i wasn't i literally felt like i was this old man now and did it feel like you were old man scott or i mean couldn't you tell hard to tell but i still remember it vividly like i remember that memory vividly i mean that's crazy like i was three or four but i um uh it felt like like i was that they're both both both were me at the same time i was old scott like knowing everything like that an old man knows and being like oh gosh but i have this three-year-old body that has to like live it live live it through like i have to like go through the motions of living a life but i i see it at the end of the life i see the whole life lived um it was a weirdest thing yeah you know it's the kind of thing that i mean these experiences do happen people and yeah i mean with our cases we do have some where the child will talk uh with great emotion about a past life just one time and then they parents will ask them about a week later they don't even remember it um but then there are others you know where people will have sort of transcendental experiences which you know is a three-year-old sort of being able to or seemingly stepping back from your day-to-day experience and seeing the big picture um is is something that happens to people and you know what we make of that uh it sounds like you sort of stepped out of time for for yeah yeah just had a very like mature way of i mean i wasn't a three-year-old at that moment you know just so it's so uh it's so interesting so these are some explanations to consider um and i wanted to go through this there are normal explanations and then of course there are paranormal explanations let's just let's start with the normal the normal ones um you say quote we approach the cases with an attitude of scientific curiosity we were open to all possibilities i mean gosh what a great scientific approach i wish all scientists had had that approach quite frankly i can't say i'll do so normal explanations include things like well maybe these kids have fraud maybe it's fraud what what would fraud it's not like the kids are creating the fraud but they're broad conditions that make it look like those kids are saying those things right is that was that one of that potential yeah actually ian susan published a case of i mean published a paper on i think it was seven cases of either deception or self-deception um sometimes very rarely where the child's family may be trying to get say money out of a wealthy family and say that their child was the previously uh family member what's more common i think is self-deception where um the families may make sort of too much of what of the child's statements and then kind of build this story that that the child was either a deceased family member in a past life or occasionally famous a famous person i mean i've gotten ones for famous people like babe ruth and and people like that okay i mean i'm not skeptical the child wasn't being rude i'm pretty scared well what do you do what if you get five kids and they all say that they were babe ruth do you got it like they gotta fight that out amongst themselves like you know which is the real one yeah well right so i mean that almost never happens with kids but we do get some reports from adults who feel like they were someone famous in the past often not because they have specific memories but because of other aspects or coincidence or similarities uh so yeah we've had a number of thomas jefferson's i think that's the leading one you know university of virginia and i mean the adult cases we tend to look at with a fairly skeptical eye anyway because if you don't have specific memories i think it's very hard to even speculate about who you were in a past life but again i mean that's a tiny minority of these cases for the most part there's no reason to think that the parents or the child that they're committing deception and typically there's not even any grounds to think they would be committing self-deception you actually just maybe think of a question that have you ever had two children claimed to have memories of the same person not famous you know wouldn't that be interesting yeah there are cases um one of our colleagues antonia mills up in northern british columbia uh studied cases of um with the tribal peoples up there and there were there are some communities where uh they will assign not a sign but recognize a child as being a past life uh person on very um limited grounds i mean they say a dream and they may decide okay this child was that person and it's usually like a village elder or somebody that was well respected in the community so not a famous person but somebody that people looked up to so there may be three or four kids who are all identified as being that person in the past but again that that's a real exception to do real rare real rare yeah um another potential explanation is well we already discussed this one which is fantasy yeah um but i think we already discussed and you kind of maybe well yeah i mean i will say if none of these memories could be verified then i would have a great belief in the likelihood that this could be fantastic when kids certainly are capable of fantasy and say all kinds of things uh again we don't take that at face values whether we can determine that these statements actually matched a past life but before we would think that it's more than just fantasy yeah um and then faulty memory by informants uh how much could that explain the findings right so the idea is that the child makes some perhaps general statements about a past life that the family finds someone whose life more or less match those uh statements and then after the families meet and exchange information then the child gets credited with more information than they actually had and there are certainly cases where that warrants serious consideration um but then there are all the cases where we've got written documentation of what the child said before anyone knew that there was a previous person so we can be sure that they're not faulty memory in those because we've got documentation and then this one is very interesting and for a number of reasons genetic memory this one kind of gets to the heart of a lot of uh a lot of things that i that i personally study or worlds we're gonna are about to intersect in a second you'll see why but can you tell me a little bit about what that is what is genetic memory yeah the thought is that the idea is that the memories would be um transferred in the genes to the child so it would not be some sort of paranormal kind of thing but a physical uh transfer through the genes um but that does not explain could not explain most of our cases partly because most of the time the child is not talking about a direct ancestor which they would have to be equal for the genes to capture it and also most of the children have memories of how they died which of course people die after they've already passed on their genetic material um so you know there are a lot of very interesting facets to what can be transferred in genes or at least epigenetically but what kinds of memories perhaps can be transferred but it doesn't seem to be a factor in these cases well hold up hold up um my own area of research this is where our worlds intersect and i've long been thinking about this um i've studied prodigies and i've studied savants and uh i'm very dear friends with a man named darryl treffer who passed away pretty recently and he was he was the scientific advisor to the movie rain man but he was also the most knowledgeable well-known scientist studying savants and he had this idea of genetic memory he thought that was the only explanation he thought that was the best explanation for how a lot of these individuals with very little iqs even could sit down and paint something photorealistic or sit down the piano and play something amazing and even in the prodigies realm there's a lot of trying to understand how children under the age of 10 can just have a fully formed talent uh you know it takes a little bit of practice but it doesn't take that much input for them to learn it's not like the parents are pushing these kids it's the kids are pushing the parents and then i've studied at great length the idea of gifted children the idea of prodigies um and my friend david henry feldman wrote a book about prodigies and in specifically in there he noted that there seemed to be a higher than greater chance of these kids somewhere in their ancestry there was someone who had a talent that resembled it and he didn't rule out the possibility that there was some sort of genetic memory so genetic mary has been brought into the discussion of these other domains like prodigies and and savants i didn't know i don't know if you're familiar with any of these two individuals that i've mentioned or their work or writings about this but i'd love to bring all these worlds together because i think there's something really really uh there's something going on yeah there's something going on yeah and i mean i don't doubt that at all um and it may be it's conceivable that there's a genetic uh disposition to recalling past lives and they do seem more common in some um communities than others but you know my point is for the memories of one specific life um i don't see how that could be happening through genetic transfer in these cases because the recalling lies that word is not an ancestor but you know if you consider these children to be like savants or whatever they have this special ability you know it may well be that that special ability uh may have a genetic component to it yeah it gets it gets really um you know it gets it starts to get metaphysical right i mean i'm not trying to go out all ancient aliens out on on this and be like could it be that the shaka record has all these things and that we're tapping into now i'm not go i'm not that guy i actually was on an episode of ancient aliens um but i wasn't i was the scientist and i made some very clear factual statements about where genius comes from the whole episode was where does genius come from and i and i made some statement like well we can't reduce genius entirely to the brain and then the guy with the big hair said what he means is could it be that it's from the ashok record so that's not what you meant that's not what i meant um but but i think that um you know i think at this point in our conversation it'd be fun to play around in the space of what what's the pos what is possible what what is going on now of course there are i didn't mention the paranormal explanations extra sensory perception has been one that has been put forward um but as you know that doesn't explain the birthmarks possession um i'm fascinated with that one as well i you know you look at uh you know people who who who do get feel like they're possessed by the devil for instance you know and then you start to look at those cases more scientifically you see there's mental illness schizophrenia aspects that are there are more reasonable explanations than they were just possessed by the devil it's not as cut and dry as that they were just possessed by the devil um and then um and then of course the paranormal explanation of reincarnation um and you say um uh that doesn't explain fully why the memory is so fleeting for instance let's you know for remaining uh moments here let's really play in the space of what is going on dr jim tucker let's just get right down to to it you know what could be going on in a way that that science can explain someday i mean maybe we don't have the tools yet maybe that's that's part of the problem yeah i think um there are anomalies that in order to explain them you don't um start over with science but you may have to sort of broaden uh some things so you know just like quantum theory fraud and classical physics and not that i'm saying this is like commentary but um you can't just if you accept these cases you can't just map them on to a materialist understanding of reality because they involve some sort of transfer of mind even if you don't accept it as reincarnation but some sort of transfer separate from the physical um and taking sort of a larger view as as time has gone on i've become more of a scientific or philosophical idealist the idea that ultimately consciousness is at the core of reality and the physical grows out of it and there are people a lot smarter than me like max planck the founder of quantum theory who said the same thing that that um ultimately think uh reality comes down to consciousness and that can be sort of a mind-bending thing can be hard to sometimes to kind of make sense of it but if it's true that the physical grows out of the mental essentially then i don't see why an individual consciousness would be dependent on a physical brain because in fact the physical world is growing out of consciousness so it would make sense that this piece of consciousness or mind that each of us has can continue on regardless of what happens to the physical body weren't happening and then in our cases at least i have never said it universal but in our cases at least it seems that this mind has been attached to a new physical body and then continued on with new law so are you are you at least literally saying that you think the only way to fully explain the totality evidence is one where we're going to have to disassociate the mind from or consciousness from uh the physical brain in some capacity in some way yeah i mean if you accept these cases then yes i think you're pretty much forced to conclude that and you know each person can decide for themselves whether they should accept the cases but i think if you look at our strongest ones that are as a group i mean they do provide good evidence that something's going on here that these children do actually have memories of a life from the past i mean there's so many deep implications of this if this is if this is true but what i want to really understand is why they're so fleeting why the memory so fleeting why don't people when they uh get reincarnated just get reincarnated as the total person uh for the rest of their life um it could there be mechanisms at play where it that's just the way like when you have a human psychology of of immediate memories it just inhibits past life memories like that there's a huge conflict there and the way the biological system reconciles that conflict is by by um you know by prioritizing the the current uh immediate experience yeah i mean typically these kids lose these memories or most of these members uh at the same time that all kids lose memories of early childhood uh so you know uh infantile major early childhood amnesia where as i'm sure you know that their brain is undergoing tremendous changes during this period a lot of pruning and um you know memories and sometimes skills or whatever it sort of get left behind because others get prioritized it would make sense that that for most of these kids they lose those memories at the same time they lose memories of childhood now another related question is why there are such glimpses where i you know like you say it's not like suddenly they remember everything from the past life you know the person hasn't just continued on it's it's almost more like when you wake up and you've got glimpses of a dream and sometimes you remember a lot of details and then other times you got kind of images but it's pretty hard to put them together and you know they can fade that's how it is for some of these kids that they will come out with certain details at certain times but it's not like they can suddenly spout out uh the whole past life um so it's i mean it's amazing that any memories would come through right um but it's it's um it's usually not a full complete thing but it really varies from john's child so do you think it's is does your gut tell you that that we're all reincarnated from from some assemblage of prior things outside of our own genetic ancestry or do you think there are only special cases um like the ones you're discovering um so not there's so many questions to be asked about this that's one i'll stop there yeah well i feel like our cases again do provide evidence that there can be this continuation and i think that i mean i'm speculating but i think that would apply to all of us but it doesn't mean that all of us have lived here before or that we would be reborn here in this reality um you know consciousness is the core of all i don't know why we couldn't have very different kinds of experiences in very different kinds of realities so my own personal guess is that reincarnation is not universal in the sense that we all come back here but that that mind or consciousness there is a peace that does continue on for all of us what do you think happens after we die well i don't know that it's universal i mean i don't know that we all have the same experience i think that there are probably a lot of factors that go into uh what we experience next and for some it may be immediately coming back here uh but for others it may be very different and you know if you look at near-death experiences uh people who for their hearts stop and then they have these experiences there can be real variability i mean there are similarities but there can also be real individual differences and i suspect that that is true for any of the afterlife kinds of experiences well what if you want to like increase the chances that you're gonna live after you died should you die of violent death i mean is that what your research suggests um i mean that's what it suggests that you should have some dramatic ending make sure you have a dramatic ending folks well but to have the memories come through that may well be true but you know it's just like traumatic memories in this life i mean there are memories when people have ptsd memories that they wish they didn't have but they couldn't get rid of them uh there's a real strength unfortunately to traumatic memories and that may well be the case across lifetimes but as far as the kind of experience you have next i mean i would guess that it relates to the kind of experiences you have here and also the kind of life that you lead uh i mean not in a heaven and hell kind of sense but just if you're focused on love and connecting with others and giving to others you know it seems to me that would affect your whatever it is that survives if we if we call it a soul that that would have a an effect on your soul and and then would affect what comes next well this is th right i'm a scientist and i and i really am curious uh what patterns you found among the all if you look at all the people uh all the cases of the past lives and you look at like i'm a personality psychologist i want to like do the i want to crunch the numbers like of the big five personality traits is there are there certain characteristics that they all have in common is there some like i feel like we can like get this mystery like this would this would get us to like this this is real deep stuff if we can discover who what personality traits are more likely to make you live on after you die and that's that's some pretty heavy stuff there well we are doing a study now where we are interviewing adults so we originally studied as children because this work's been done on so long and we are administering big five questionnaires to them perfect uh we haven't gotten where we're done with the analysis yet but we'll see if anything comes from that i mean my guess is again there's a difference between having memories versus surviving at all i would be disappointed if it turns out certain personalities survive while others don't you know for certain personality people's personality characteristics but who knows we'll have to see where the uh where the data leads us i guess but wait i think we might be talking about different things i'm not talking about the big five traits of the the person who is alive right now as nato i'm talking about what are the common characteristics of all the past lives like what's the personality you can do that analysis right of i mean you can't physically administer the big five to them but i'm saying you can do the qualitative sort of impressions like are they are these do these tend to be good people do they live good lives like is there a pattern there or some of them do you know what i'm saying well i do i mean with the big fight yes we don't have enough information for most of them to do any sort of reasonable assessment of that as far as whether they were good people or not um there's quite a range i mean they're you know if you're more likely to die violently if that life is remembered there are plenty of people who die violently through no fault of their own but there are others who you know are involved in knife fights or you know whatever um so some of the people have been barely nasty people who did some fairly nasty things uh but then there are other people who are you know just kind of typical good people doing their best well that's that's really important information in itself i mean you're basically you know they're one of their like listeners who are saying like i want to increase the chances that like some five-year-old remembers my life you know for two years yeah that's all we get but there's another part of this that's a bit disappointing right like with the reincarnation stuff is like what where were you what are you saying like the best extension we get is some you know annoying four-year-old like remember you know being like oh i'm scarborough coffman you know and then it's like no one believes them and then you know two years later they don't remember me the rest of their life are you saying that's the best i got in terms of extending my consciousness well it it sort of do you know what i'm saying yeah i do know what you're saying but i i i like to view this as there may be sort of a larger self as well as the personalities that we have in each life so yeah i mean you know if a kid comes back and remembers your life and then by the time they're school-aged they've forgotten it um if there's a larger self that is part of your existence this time as well as the next time then you hope that this larger self grows or learns or becomes more evolved however you want to put it you hosted each lifetime that there can be progress made and you know that that is just part of our journey my gosh there's just so many implications even for theories of consciousness i'm sure you're aware of pan psychiatrism i think that's the most compatible with what your theory is um i might my prior guest my current episode that's up right now you might want to listen to it is with antonio dimaggio on the nature of consciousness um so you're going to be a really interesting counter [Laughter] from a very different view yes he's not a big fan of pan psychism um but but some people are some people that i'm friends with are um you know it's i don't have a card in this horse personally i i want to know the truth there's so many just deep implications of of this you know and it makes you just think about how does it all tie together what does it all mean no if we if we zoom out even further right like to the universe we zoom out you know as the is the universe finite is the universe not finding you know i have this kind of um intuition that the physicists would probably disagree with uh this is probably not possible but i have this intuition that that that that time just keeps looping back on itself that like that we're going to like it'll get to some point of the universe even if it's like 30 trillion years from now they're kind of like whoops back again because i don't you know like and that i'm gonna live this life again you know like i i really kind of feel that's that's that's the way it works well there are physicists who talk about basically new universes bubbling out of current ones where it's an infinite number of universes and if it's truly infinite it means that at some point there would be this same existence we have now that would be redone uh so yeah it all gets rather mind-boggling it does get mind-boggling and you can kind of see like you know the error error in the system like maybe it's not a full proof system and that's what you're seeing in your cases where like it starts to like you know uh it's like whoops we put that person's consciousness over in that person's body for a couple years whoops you know maybe it's not even like a like a conscious entity that's doing it but a process a process well that's right and yeah the process make it sort of short-circuited sometimes particularly with sudden uh violent deaths where things don't go the way they typically do and then you have my friend david chalmers running a book are we living in a simulation and he alright he puts it as a greater than 50 probability that we are what i'm saying is we need to tie all this stuff together and come up with a unitary theory of whatever in a with a scientific basis and it's just fun to even talk about dr tucker if there are people listening to this episode who uh have cases of their children or or even the kids themselves are listening by five are listening to my podcast and they want to report this to you what can they do well they can contact us through our website uh which is www dot uva dops which is division of personality studies theops.org or they just google my name and find us that way but yeah we'd love to hear from families uh if their children are talking about past lives wonderful thank you so much for approaching uh a taboo topic with such uh scientific rigor uh it's really it's really refreshing to see that and thanks for for chatting with me today on my podcast it's been my pleasure beautiful [Music] thanks for listening to this episode of the psychology podcast if you'd like to react in some way to something you heard i encourage you to join in the discussion at thessacologypodcast.com or on our youtube page the psychology podcast we also put up some videos of some episodes on our youtube page as well so you'll want to check that out thanks for being such a great supporter of the show and tune in next time for more on the mind brain behavior and creativity

Channel: The Psychology Podcast

Views: 47,822

Keywords: psychology, podcast, Scott Barry Kaufman

Id: ruL65FHeAv4

Length: 52min 2sec (3122 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022