The Scientist Who Tried to Prove Reincarnation
5/2/20261 hr 39 min
Can memories survive death? It sounds like the kind of question skeptics usually dismiss before the conversation even starts. But Ian Stevenson was not a carnival psychic or a late-night ghost hunter. He was a respected psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who spent decades investigating children who claimed to remember previous lives, along with cases involving birthmarks, apparitions, telepathy, and other alleged evidence for life after death.
In this episode, psychologist and science writer Jesse Bering talks about Stevenson's strange and fascinating career, the psychology of afterlife belief, why the mind so easily imagines consciousness continuing after death, and what to do with cases that are hard to explain but far from proven.
Jesse Bering is a science writer, research psychologist, and head of the Science Communication program at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He is the author of several books, including: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? And Other Reflections on Being Human and Suicidal: Why We Kill Ourselves. His new book is The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson: One Scientist's Epic Quest for Evidence of Reincarnation, Apparitions, Poltergeists, and Other Matters of the Soul.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Jesse Bering· Guest0:39
[ding] Responsive xenoglossy, speaking in a foreign language placed under hypnosis basically and, you know, go into this trance and they would not only speak this language that allegedly they had no knowledge of. So, you know, this housewife in Ohio starts speaking German but she's never taken a, you know, she's not educated, she's never been to Germany. But the key for him was that it wasn't that she was just kind of saying these things in German which is easy to find a couple of s- sentences and, you know, sprinkle them into a conversation. She was actually responding to questions that were asked in German and he thought that that was important as a paranormal case because you can't really explain dialogue because that requires lived experience in his mind. My argument in the suicide book is basically that people most frequently die by suicide for social reasons, for because of negative social appraisal,