The Science of

Reincarnation
When Ryan Hammons was 4 years old, he began directing imaginary movies. Shouts of “Action!”
often echoed from his room.

But the play became a concern for Ryan’s parents when he began waking up in the middle of the
night screaming and clutching his chest, saying he dreamed his heart exploded when he was in
Hollywood. His mother, Cyndi, asked his doctor about the episodes. Night terrors, the doctor said.
He’ll outgrow them. Then one night, as Cyndi tucked Ryan into bed, Ryan suddenly took hold of
Cyndi’s hand.

“Mama,” he said. “I think I used to be someone else.”

He said he remembered a big white house and a swimming pool. It was in Hollywood, many miles
from his Oklahoma home. He said he had three sons, but that he couldn’t remember their names.
He began to cry, asking Cyndi over and over why he couldn’t remember their names.

“I really didn’t know what to do,” Cyndi said. “I was more in shock than anything. He was so insistent
about it. After that night, he kept talking about it, kept getting upset about not being able to
remember those names. I started researching the Internet about reincarnation. I even got some
books from the library on Hollywood, thinking their pictures might help him. I didn’t tell anyone for
months.”

One day, as Ryan and Cyndi paged through one of the Hollywood books, Ryan stopped at a black-
and-white still taken from a 1930s movie, Night After Night. Two men in the center of the picture
were confronting one another. Four other men surrounded them. Cyndi didn’t recognize any of the
faces, but Ryan pointed to one of the men in the middle.

“Hey Mama,” he said. “That’s George. We did a picture together.” His finger then shot over to a man
on the right, wearing an overcoat and a scowl. “That guy’s me. I found me!”

Ryan’s claims, while rare, are not unique among the more than 2,500 case files sitting inside the
offices of Jim B. Tucker (Res ’89), an associate psychiatry professor at the UVA Medical Center’s
Division of Perceptual Studies.

For nearly 15 years, Tucker has been investigating claims made by children, usually between the ages
of 2 and 6 years old, who say they’ve had past lives.The children are sometimes able to provide
enough detail about those lives that their stories can be traced back to an actual person—rarely
famous and often entirely unknown to the family—who died years before.

Tucker, one of the only scientists in the world studying the phenomenon, says the strength of the
cases he encounters varies. Some can be easily discounted, for instance, when it becomes clear that
a child’s innocuous statements come within a family that desperately misses a loved one.
But in a number of the cases, like Ryan’s, Tucker says the most logical, scientific explanation for a
claim is as simple as it is astounding: Somehow, the child recalls memories from another life.

“I understand the leap it takes to conclude there is something beyond what we can see and touch,”
says Tucker, who served as medical director of the University’s Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic for
nearly a decade. “But there is this evidence here that needs to be accounted for, and when we look
at these cases carefully, some sort of carry-over of memories often makes the most sense.”

In his latest book, Return to Life, due out this month, Tucker details some of the more compelling
American cases he’s researched and outlines his argument that discoveries within quantum
mechanics, the mind-bending science of how nature’s smallest particles behave, provide clues to
reincarnation’s existence.

“Quantum physics indicates that our physical world may grow out of our consciousness,” Tucker
says. “That’s a view held not just by me, but by a number of physicists as well.”

Little Controversy

While his work might be expected to garner fierce debate within the scientific community, Tucker’s
research, based in part on the cases accumulated all over the world by his predecessor, Ian
Stevenson, who died in 2007, has caused little stir.

Michael Levin, director of the Centre for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts University
—who wrote in an academic review of Tucker’s first book that it presented a “first-rate piece of
research”—said that’s because current scientific research models have no way to prove or debunk
Tucker’s findings.

“When you fish with a net with a certain size of holes, you will never catch any fish smaller than
those holes,” Levin says. “What you find is limited by how you are searching for it. Our current
methods and concepts have no way of dealing with these data.”

Tucker, whose research is funded entirely by an endowment, began his reincarnation research in the
late 1990s, after he read an article in the Charlottesville Daily Progress about Stevenson’s office
winning a grant to study the effects of near-death experiences.

“I was curious about the idea of life after death and whether the scientific method could be used to
study it,” Tucker says.

He began volunteering within Stevenson’s department and after a few years found himself a
permanent researcher in the office, where his duties included overseeing the electronic coding of
Stevenson’s reincarnation cases.

That coding took years—Stevenson’s handwritten case files reached back to 1961—but Tucker said
the work is yielding intriguing insights.

Roughly 70 percent of the children say they died violent or unexpected deaths in their previous life.
Males account for close to three-quarters of those deaths—almost precisely the same ratio of males
who die of unnatural causes in the general population.

More cases are reported in countries where reincarnation is part of the religious culture, but Tucker
says there is no correlation between how strong a case is deemed and that family’s beliefs in
reincarnation.
One out of five children who report a past life say they recall the intermission, the time between
death and birth, although there is no consistent view of what that’s like. Some allege they were in
“God’s house,” while others claim they waited near where they died before "going inside” their
mother.

In cases where a child’s story has been traced to another individual, the median time between the
death of that person and the child’s birth is about 16 months.

Further research by Tucker and others has shown the children generally have above-average IQs and
do not possess any mental or emotional disorders beyond average groups of children. None appears
to have been dissociating from painful family situations.

Nearly 20 percent of the children studied have scar like birthmarks or even unusual deformities that
closely match marks or injuries the person whose life the child recalls received at or near his or her
death.

Most children’s claims generally subside around age 6, coinciding roughly with what Tucker says is
the time children’s brains ready themselves for a new stage of development.

Despite the otherworldly nature of their stories, almost none of the children exhibit any signs of
being particularly enlightened, Tucker says.

“My impression of the children is that while a few make philosophical statements about life, most
are just typical kids,” he says. “It might be a situation similar to not being any smarter on the first
day of first grade than you were on the last day of kindergarten.”

Other Explanations

Raised as a Southern Baptist in North Carolina, Tucker has weighed other, earthlier, explanations to
the phenomenon.

He’s looked at fraud, perhaps for financial gain or fame. But most claims usually don’t net a movie
deal, and many of the families Tucker’s met, particularly in the West, are reluctant to speak publicly
about their child’s unusual behaviour. Tucker has also considered simple childhood fantasy play, but
that doesn’t explain how the details children offer can sometimes lead back to a individual. “It defies
logic that it would just be a coincidence,” he says.

Faulty memories of witnesses are likely present in many cases, Tucker says, but there are dozens of
instances where people made notes of what the children were saying almost from the beginning.

“None of those possibilities would also explain some of the other patterns, like the intense
emotional attachment many children have to these memories, as Ryan exhibited,” Tucker says.

Tucker believes the relatively small number of claims he and Stevenson collected during the last five
decades, especially from America, is partly because parents may dismiss or misunderstand what
their children are telling them. “If children get a message that they aren’t being listened to, they will
stop talking,” Tucker says. “They see they aren’t supported. Most kids aim to please their parents.”

How exactly the consciousness, or at least memories, of one person might transfer to another is
obviously a mystery, but Tucker believes the answers might be found within the foundations of
quantum physics.

Scientists have long known that matter like electrons and protons produces events only when
observed.
A simplified example: Take light and shine it through a screen with two slits cut in it. Behind the
screen, put a photographic plate that records the light. When the light is unobserved as it travels,
the plate shows it went through both slits. But what happens when the light is observed? The plate
shows the particles go through just one of the slits. The light’s behaviour changes, and the only
difference is that it is being observed. There’s plenty of debate on what that might mean. But
Tucker, like Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, believes that discovery shows that the
physical world is affected by, and even derived from the non-physical, from consciousness.

If that’s true, then consciousness doesn’t require a three-pound brain to exist, Tucker says, and so
there’s no reason to think that consciousness would end with it.

“It’s conceivable that in some way consciousness could be expressed in a new life,” Tucker says.

Robert Pollock, director of the Centre for the Study of Science and Religion at Columbia University,
said scientists have long pondered the role observation might play in the physical world, but the
hypotheses about it are not necessarily scientific. “Debates among physicists that centre on the
clarity and beauty of an idea but not on its dis-provability are common to my mind, but are not
scientific debates at all,” says Pollock. “I think what Planck and others since who have looked at how
these very small particles behave, and then made inferences about consciousness, are expressing a
hope. That’s fine; I hope they are right. But there’s no way to disprove the idea.”

Associate Professor of Psychiatry Jim B. Tucker

Tucker says his hypothesis is based on more than just wishful thinking. “It’s much more than a
hope,” he says. “Having direct positive evidence for a theory can have value, even if negative
evidence against it is not possible.”