Do you believe in life after death? These scientists study it

Is reincarnation real? Is communication from the “beyond” possible? A small set of academics are trying to find out, case by case.

In an otherwise nondescript office in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, a small leather chest sits atop a filing cabinet. Within it lies a combination lock, unopened for more than 50 years. The man who set it is dead.

On its own, the lock is unremarkable – the kind you might use at the gym. The code, a mnemonic of
a six-letter word converted into numbers, was known only to psychiatrist Dr Ian Stevenson, who set it long before he died and years before he retired as director of the Division of Perceptual Studies, or DOPS, a parapsychology research unit he founded in 1967 within the University of Virginia’s school of medicine.

Stevenson called this experiment the Combination Lock Test for Survival. He reasoned that if he could transmit the code to someone from the grave, it might help answer the questions that had consumed him in life: is communication from the “beyond” possible? Can the personality survive bodily death? Or simply: is reincarnation real?

This last conundrum – the survival of consciousness after death – continues to be at the forefront of the division’s research. The team has logged hundreds of cases of children who claim to remember past lives from all continents except Antarctica. “And that’s only because we haven’t looked for cases there,” said Dr Jim Tucker, who has been investigating claims of past lives for more than two decades. He recently retired after having been the director of DOPS since 2015.

It was an unexpected career path to begin with.

“As far as reincarnation itself goes, I never had any particular interest in it,” said Tucker, who set out to solely become a child psychiatrist and was, at one point, the head of the university’s Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic. “Even when I was training, it never occurred to me that I’d end up doing this work.”

Now, at 64 years old, after travelling the world to record cases of possible past-life recollections, and with books and papers of his own on the subject of past lives, he has left the position.

“There’s a level of stress in medicine and in academics,” he reflected. “There are always things you should be doing, papers you should be writing, prescriptions you should be giving. I enjoyed my day-to-day work, both in the clinic and at DOPS, but you reach a point where you’re ready not to have so many responsibilities and demands.”

According to a job listing issued by the medical school, on top of their academic reputation, the ideal candidate to replace Tucker must have “a track record of rigorous investigation of extraordinary human experiences, such as the mind’s relationship to the body and the possibility of consciousness surviving physical death”.

None of the eight principal team members have the required academic status to undertake the role, making it necessary to find someone externally.

“I think there’s a feeling that it would be rejuvenating for the group to have an outside person come in,” said Dr Jennifer Payne, vice chair of research in the psychiatry department, who leads the selection committee.

Straying from the usual path

Tucker was running a busy practice when he first learned about DOPS. It was 1996, and a local newspaper, The Daily Progress in Charlottesville, had profiled Stevenson after he received funding to interview individuals about their near-death experiences. Entranced by the pioneering work, Tucker began volunteering at the division before joining as a permanent researcher.

Each of the division’s researchers has committed their career – and, to some extent, risked their professional reputation – to the study of the so-called paranormal. This includes near-death and out-of-body experiences, altered states of consciousness, and past lives research, which all come under the portmanteau of “parapsychology”. They are scientists who have strayed from the usual path.

DOPS is a curious institution. There are only a few other labs in the world undertaking similar lines of research – the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh, for instance – with DOPS being by far the most prominent. The only other major parapsychology unit in the United States was Princeton’s Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory, or PEAR, which focused on telekinesis and extrasensory perception. That unit was shuttered in 2007.

While it is technically part of the University of Virginia, DOPS occupies four spacious would-be condominiums inside a residential building. It is notably distanced from the university’s leafy main campus, and at least a couple of miles from the medical school.

“Nobody knows we’re here,” said Dr Bruce Greyson, 78, a former director of DOPS and a professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the university, who started working with Stevenson in the late 1970s. “Ian was very cautious about that, because he had faced a lot of prejudice. He kept a very low profile.”

Greyson received a lot of pushback before joining DOPS. He had worked at the University of Michigan for eight years early in his career, but his interest in near-death experiences began to ruffle feathers, much as it had for Stevenson.

“They told me, point blank, that I wouldn’t have a future there if I did near-death research, because you can’t measure that in a test tube,” he said. “Unless I could quantify it by a biological measure, they didn’t want to hear about it.” He left Michigan for the University of Connecticut, where he spent 11 years, and then found his way to DOPS.

The atmosphere within DOPS is one of studious calm. There are only a few signs of the team’s activities. In the basement laboratory, one finds a copper-lined Faraday cage used to assess out-of-body-experience subjects, and foam mannequin heads sporting electroencephalogram caps. Upstairs, running the full length of the wall in the Ian Stevenson Memorial Library, which has more than 5000 books and papers pertaining to past lives research, is a glass display case containing a collection of knives, swords and mallets – weapons described by children who recalled a violent end in a previous life.

“It’s not the actual weapon, but the kind of weapon used,” Tucker explained. Each object is labeled with intricate, sometimes gory, detail. One display told the story of a young girl, Ma Myint Thein from Burma, now Myanmar, who was born with deformities of her fingers and birthmarks across her back and neck. “According to villagers,” the label reads, “the man whose life she remembered being had been murdered, his fingers chopped off and his throat slashed by a sword.” It is accompanied by a photograph of the girl’s hands, her right one missing two fingers.

That children who claim to remember past lives are most frequently found in South Asia, where reincarnation is a core tenet of many religious beliefs, has been used by critics to debunk the studies. After all, surely it’s all too easy to find corroborative evidence in places with a preexisting belief in reincarnation.

The question of life after death has been an existential preoccupation for humans throughout time, however, and reincarnation is a central tenet of belief in many cultures. Buddhism, where there is thought to be a 49-day journey between death and rebirth; Hinduism, with its concept of samsara, the endless cycle; and Native American and West African nations all share similar core concepts of the soul or spirit moving from one life to the next. Meanwhile, a 2023 Pew Research survey found that a quarter of Americans believe it is “definitely or probably true” that people who have died can be reincarnated.

When it comes to past life claims, the DOPS team works on cases that almost always have come directly from parents.

Common features in children who claim to have led a previous life include a verbal precocity and mannerisms at odds with that of the rest of the family. Unexplained phobias or aversions have also been thought to have been transferred over from a past existence. In some cases, the remembrances are extremely clear: the names, professions and quirks of a different set of relatives; the particularities of the streets they used to live on; and sometimes even recollections of obscure historical events – details the child couldn’t possibly have known about.

One of the most famous cases the team worked on was that of James Leininger, an American boy who remembered being a fighter pilot in Japan. The case drew a great deal of attention to DOPS but also brought with it numerous detractors.

Ben Radford, the deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine dedicated to scientific research, believes that wishful thinking and general death anxiety have fueled an increased interest in reincarnation, and he finds flaws in the DOPS research methodology, which he often dissects in his blog. He said, “The fact is, no matter how sincere the person is, often recovered memories are false.”

‘The evidence is not flawless’

Remembered by many as a dignified man with a penchant for three-piece suits, Stevenson lived for his research. He almost never took time off. “I had to swing by the office once on New Year’s Eve, and there was one car in the lot, and it was his,” Tucker recalled.

Born in 1918, Stevenson, who was Canadian and graduated from St Andrews with a degree in history before studying biochemistry and psychiatry at McGill University, had served as chair of the psychiatry department at Virginia for 10 years until 1967.

By the early 1960s, he had become disillusioned by conventional medicine. In an interview with The New York Times in 1999, he said that he had been drawn to studying past lives through his “discontent with other explanations of human personality”.

“I wasn’t satisfied with psychoanalysis or behaviourism or, for that matter, neuroscience,” he continued. “Something seemed to be missing.”

And so he began recording potential cases of reincarnation, which he would come to call “cases of the reincarnation type”, or CORT. It was one of his initial CORT research papers, from a 1966 trip to India, that caught the attention of Chester F. Carlson, the inventor of the technology behind Xerox photocopying machines. It was Carlson’s generous financial assistance that enabled Stevenson to leave his role at the medical school and focus full-time on past lives research.

The dean of the medical school at the time, Kenneth Crispell, didn’t approve of this move into the paranormal. He was happy to see Stevenson resign from his spot in the psychiatry department and, believing in academic freedom, agreed to the formation of a small research division. However, any hope Crispell had that Stevenson and his unorthodox ideas would disappear into the academic shadows was quickly dashed: Carlson died of a heart attack in 1968, and in his will, he bequeathed US$1 million to Stevenson’s endeavour.

While not all of the attention was positive in the division’s early years, some individuals in the science community were intrigued. “Either Dr Stevenson is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known as the Galileo of the 20th century,” psychiatrist Harold Lief wrote in a 1977 article for The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

To this day, DOPS is still financed entirely by private donations. In October, the division announced that it had received the first instalment of a $1 million gift from the Philip B. Rothenberg Legacy Fund, which will be used to finance early-career researchers.

Other supporters have included the Bonner sisters, Priscilla Bonner-Woolfan and Margerie Bonner-Lowry – actresses of the 1920s, whose endowment continues to fund the DOPS directorship. Another unlikely supporter is actor John Cleese, who first encountered the division at the Esalen Institute, a retreat and intentional community in Big Sur, California.

“These people are behaving like good scientists,” Cleese said in a phone interview. “Good scientists are after the truth: they don’t just want to be right. I think it is absolutely astonishing and quite disgraceful, the way that orthodox contemporary, materialistic reductionist theory treats all the things – and there are so many of them – that they can’t begin to explain.”

In the early years of the department, Stevenson travelled the world extensively, recording more than 2500 cases of children recalling past lives. In this pre-internet time, discovering so many similar accounts and trends served to strengthen his thesis. The findings from these excursions, collected in Stevenson’s neat handwriting, are stored by country in filing cabinets and are in the slow process of being digitised.

From this database, researchers have yielded findings they believe are interesting. The strongest cases, according to the DOPS researchers, have been found in children younger than 10, and a majority of remembrances tend to occur between the ages of 2 and 6, after which they appear to fade. The median time between death and rebirth is about 16 months, a period the researchers see as a form of intermission. Very often, the child has memories that match up to the life of a deceased relative.

And yet, Stevenson was aware of the limitations of past lives research. “The evidence is not flawless, and it certainly does not compel such a belief,” he said in a lecture at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) in 1989. “Even the best of it is open to alternative interpretations, and one can only censure those who say there is no evidence whatsoever.”

“Ian thought reincarnation was the best explanation, but he wasn’t positive,” Greyson said. “He thought a lot of the cases may be something else. It might be a kind of possession; it might even be delusion. There are lots of different possibilities. It may be clairvoyance, or picking up the information from some other sources that you’re not aware of.”

After spending more than half his life studying past lives, Stevenson retired from DOPS in 2002, handing the directorial baton to Greyson. Although he kept a watchful eye on proceedings from afar, offering guidance when solicited, he never set foot in the division again. He died of pneumonia five years later, at 88 years old.

Difficult memories

Each year, DOPS receives more than 100 emails from parents regarding something their child has said. Reaching out to the division is often an attempt at clarity, but the researchers never promise answers. Their only promise is to take these claims seriously, “but as far as the case having enough to investigate, enough to potentially verify that it matches with a past life, those are very few”, Tucker said.

Last summer, Tucker drove to the rural town of Amherst, Virginia, to investigate a case of possible past life remembrance. He was joined by his colleagues Marieta Pehlivanova and Philip Cozzolino, who would be taking over his research in the new year.

Pehlivanova, 43, who specialises in near-death experience and children who remember past lives, has been at DOPS for seven years and is beginning a study of women who have had near-death experiences during childbirth. When she tells people what she does, they find the subject matter both fascinating and disturbing. “We’ve had emails from people saying we’re doing the work of the devil,” she said.

Upon arrival at the family’s home, the team was shown into the kitchen. A child, who was 3, the youngest of four home-schooled siblings, peeked from behind her mother’s legs, looking up shyly. She wore a baggy Minnie Mouse shirt and went to perch between her grandparents on a banquette, watching everyone take seats around the dining table.

“Let’s start from the very beginning,” Tucker said after the paperwork had been signed by Misty, 28, the child’s mother. “It all began with the puzzle piece?”

A few months earlier, mother and child had been looking at a wooden puzzle of the United States, with each state represented by a cartoon of a person or object. Misty’s daughter pointed excitedly at the jagged piece representing Illinois, which had an abstract illustration of Abraham Lincoln.

“That’s Pom,” her daughter exclaimed. “He doesn’t have his hat on.”

This was indeed a drawing of Abraham Lincoln without his hat, but more important, there was no name under the image indicating who he was. After weeks of endless talk about “Pom” bleeding out after being hurt and being carried to a too-small bed – which the family had started to think could be related to Lincoln’s assassination – they began to consider that their daughter had been present for the historical moment. This was despite the family having no prior belief in reincarnation, nor any particular interest in Lincoln.

On the drive to Amherst, Tucker confessed his hesitation in taking on this particular case – or any case connected to a famous individual. “If you say your child was Babe Ruth, for example, there would be lots of information online,” he said. “When we get those cases, usually it’s that the parents are into it. Still, it’s all a little strange to be coming out of a 3-year-old’s mouth. Now, if she had said her daughter was Lincoln, I probably wouldn’t have made the trip.”

Lately, Tucker has been giving the children picture tests. “Where we think we know the person they’re talking about, we’ll show them a picture from that life, and then show them another picture – a dummy picture – from somewhere else, to see if they can pick out the right one,” he said. “You have to have a few pictures for it to mean anything. I had one where the kid remembered dying in Vietnam. I showed him eight pairs of pictures, and a couple of them he didn’t make any choice on, but the others he was six out of six. So, you know, that makes you think. But this girl is so young that I don’t think we can do that.”

On this occasion, the little girl decided not to engage and pretended to be asleep. Then she actually fell asleep.

“She’ll come around to it soon,” Misty assured the researchers. As the minutes ticked by, Tucker decided the picture test would be best left for another time. The child was still asleep when the researchers returned to their car.

After the first meeting, the only course of action is to do nothing and wait, to see if the memories develop into something more concrete. Since the onus for past lives research is on spontaneous recollections, the team is largely unconvinced by the concept of hypnotic regression. “People will be hypnotised and told to go back to their past lives and all that, which we’re quite sceptical about,” Tucker said. “You can also make up a lot of stuff, even if you’re talking about memories from this life.”

DOPS rarely takes accounts from adults into consideration. “They’re not our primary interest, partly because, as an adult, you’ve been exposed to a lot,” Tucker explained. “You may think that you don’t know things from history, but you may well have been exposed to it. But also, the phenomenon typically happens in young kids. It’s as if they carry the memories with them, and they are typically very young when they start talking.”

There is also the concern that parents are looking for attention. “There are people who say, ‘Well, the parents are just doing it to have their 15 minutes of fame or whatever,’” Tucker said. “But most of them have no interest in anyone knowing about it, you know, because it’s kind of embarrassing, or they worry people will think their kid is weird.”

For a child, recalling a past life can be trying. “They might be missing people or have a sense of unfinished business,” he said. After a silence, he continued, his voice contemplative. “Frankly, it’s probably better for the child that they don’t have these memories, because so many of the memories are difficult. The majority of kids who remember how they died perished in some kind of violent, unnatural death.”

A hopeful view

The researchers hope that the idea of the mind surviving bodily death will be better understood in the years to come – and taken more seriously.

“I doubt there’s going to be one finding or one study that suddenly convinces everyone that we need to change how we understand reality, but I think it can encourage people to explore that,” Tucker said, referring to the work that has been done in the field of past lives research in the past century.

But why does any of this matter?

The team at DOPS believes a greater acceptance of life being a continuous cycle could have a positive effect on the way we live.

“It could certainly impact how people view their lives,” Tucker said. “I think it’s a more hopeful view than the idea that this is just a random universe that is meaningless. Of course, people find this in their religion, but if people could see that there is this aspect of themselves that continues, it could help with grief and death anxiety and, you know, hopefully help people treat each other a little better. There would be a stronger sense that we’re all kind of in this together – that, again, this is not just a pointless existence.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Saskia Solomon

Photographs by: Matt Eich

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES