Mm

...

in the 1960s.

Uh, and he, he, but he expressed doubts about whether the current Dalai Lama was the true reincarnation of the previous one because of certain, you know, I guess, I don't, red flags is a little too strong, but I guess he saw some, um, some unconvincing evidence that, that did not really fit his, his view of what, how the reincarnation worked.

So, and, and I guess the main criticism was that he thought that the, uh, the Buddhist tradition of detecting or determining who the, who the actual reincarnation of the Dalai Lama was is a flawed process.

Like, you know, you give a child, you know, two objects to choose from, and if they choose the one that belonged to the previous Dalai Lama, then that's evidence of them.

But he's like, "Well, that's just statistically, it's 50/50." You know? If he gets w- if he gets it right, it doesn't necessarily mean anything.

Mm-hmm.

you

have a case where a very young child, say two or three or four, seems to be unbidden and spontaneously sharing, typically with their parents, very idiosyncratic details about what is presumably a previous personality or a past life.

So he began to kind of look more closely at these children's cases.

He was the one who sort of pioneered that line of investigation into children's memories of past lives.

He did most of his early investigations and actually a lot of his later investigations as well in Southeast Asia.

So there would be cases where I give a number of them in the book, but there's a case where a little boy in a small village in a rural area is in the kitchen.

He's three years old, sitting in the kitchen with his mother.

Would you like to tell us about him?

How did he get interested in children's, like, past life memories? W- Was it some kind of accidental thing he stumbled over or?

or?So he, he entered a competition, um, in 1959 that was sponsored by the American Society for Psychical Research and the, the...

There was a, an essay competition, and the prize was basically for the most compelling evidence or case that could be made for, um, the survival of consciousness after death, and it was in honor, the essay prize was in honor of William James.

And Ian Stevenson, by that time, was the head of the psychiatry and neurology department at, at UVA, um, but was increasingly sort of dabbling in these, these para- parapsychological topics.

And I don't know, I don't know exactly how he put the pieces together, but I think, you know, partially it was because of his long-standing interest in reincarnation, you know, his exposure to the subject matter through his mother.

Um, but also, you know, in the intervening, intervening years, all the document, all the documentation that he'd read about similar, about cases that he thought were intriguing, um, that were reported in newspapers and books about reincarnation.

And he basically compiled a, uh, an, an, uh, an essay that, um, analyzed data that had been published in these public sources over decades that suggested that the most convincing cases were those of, uh, he saw a pattern, basically.

Could you tell us what happened with that one?

How do we know that we're that much more aware than most animals that we will die? Because there are examples in the animal kingdom, whales, chimps, elephants, I think particularly, where there do seem to be rituals that are done by other animals when one of their group dies.

Well, there are definitely a lot of ethnographic studies, anecdotal evidence suggesting that other species, like especially these intensely social species like chimpanzees, whales, dolphins, and so on, have some... you know, unusual behaviors surrounding the death of those in their end group.

What they're thinking about the continuity of their minds after death, to me, is a separate question.

So I think that there's sufficient evidence that they treat dead bodies differently.

So they might have an awareness of the biological organism ceasing to exist.

But whether they contribute, whether they attribute ongoing psychological states in this sort of sense of an afterlife, To me, that has not been firmly established.

And, you know, even some of the anecdotal, the rich anecdotal accounts of, you know, whales beaching themselves, for instance, or, you know, chimpanzees experiencing depression at the death of a, you know, of an in-group member.

Tell us a little bit more about what that showed you.

Can you give us a bit more detail on that?

Well, we hear quite often these days about so-called children's memories of previous lives, but he's the one that established that entire line of investigation.

He, again, you know, had a lot of experience reading the reincarnation literature, but he also thought there was some empirical credibility to this idea that of a sort of transmigration of consciousness after death from one human body to the next.

And his most compelling cases were those where a young child would begin spontaneously sharing idiosyncratic details of what he called a previous personality that could be identified.

And he would systematically attempt to rule out any normal mode of communication that the child would have used to acquire that information about a dead person.

So he was especially interested in cases where the child was remembering the life of somebody that they were not related to, so a complete stranger.

something, and also cases where the dead person was somebody who could be easily identified as having lived relatively recently, so that he could actually verify this information or corroborate the information with relatives of the person who was still living.

Which are the ones that stood out for you?

Can you give us a bit more detail on that?

Well, we hear quite often these days about so-called children's memories of previous lives, but he's the one that established that entire line of investigation.

Again, had a lot of experience reading the reincarnation literature, but he also thought there was some empirical credibility to this idea that of a sort of transmigration of consciousness after death from one human body to the next.

And his most compelling cases were those where a young child would begin spontaneously sharing idiosyncratic details of what he called a previous personality that could be identified.

And he would systematically attempt to rule out any normal mode of communication that the child would have used to acquire that information about a dead person.

So he was especially interested in cases where the child was remembering the life of somebody that they were not related to, so a complete stranger.

and also cases where the dead person was somebody who could be easily identified as having lived relatively recently, so that he could actually verify this information or corroborate the information with relatives of the person who was still living.

Which are the ones that stood out for you?

[singing]

But his, his research on children's memories of previous lives is held as sort of the pinnacle of achievement in terms of, uh, uh, parapsychological evidence of the afterlife.

Um, but he didn't start off as a parapsychologist.

He was actually trained as a, um, um, a, a, a psychosomatic researcher, so he was a, he was a medical physician.

He got his medical degree from McGill University, um, and his earliest research was on the role of, um, really powerful, sort of potent emotions and their effects on the body.

So he was involved with some of this early research at, uh, Cornell University as a postdoc, where they had, uh, psychiatric patients, and they would make them upset, basically.

So they would interview these, these patients about something really distressing like, you know, their cheating spouse or, you know, um, misbehaving child or, you know, trouble at work, and they would look at the effects of that uncomfortable, stressful conversation on their physicality.

Yeah, yeah

So what, what, what led you to, to this subject, to, to his work?

So despite my work in science communication and writing a lot about sex and suicide and God and all these types of things, my, my own research program, in terms of my laboratory research, was on people's reasoning and beliefs about the afterlife.

Um, so going way back to my PhD, for instance, um, I studied people's intuitive conceptions of the continuity of the mind after biological death.

I, you know, did studies with children, looking at how they differ as a consequence of cognitive developmental stages about reasoning about the afterlife.

Um, one of the biggest takeaways from that, that early work was that the younger the child, you know, three and four-year-olds basically, the more likely they were to say that, um-Mental states survived biological death, so emotions and, um, intentions and perceptual states compared to older kids who presumably had acquired more scientific knowledge and more understanding between the, the relationship, at least the, the material relationship between the, the mind and the brain.

And that was kind of shocking at the time because people just assumed that belief in the afterlife was a byproduct of religious indoctrination or what children had been taught, um, or exposed to culturally.

But, you know, my argument, um, and these data have been replicated cross-culturally now, suggested that, uh, the, those data suggested that, um, there's an innate component to afterlife beliefs, that this is our cognitive default.

[clears throat]