Tucker’s reincarnation research: Cook excerpt #18

Nick Cook writes: Jim B. Tucker, the Bonner-Lowry Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, became intrigued by children’s past life memories after reading Stevenson’s work. In a paper published in 2006, he raises an often-overlooked aspect of past-life experiences: the memories reported by children of events occurring during the interval between death and rebirth.

Approximately 20 per cent of children in reincarnation cases, he found, make such reports⁵³.

Here, suddenly, I found myself back at the nub of the near-death issue that had vexed the question of veridical evidence surrounding Maria’s shoe.

It is impossible, critics of the post-death survival thesis say, to separate an NDE from an OBE because the ‘psychic interpretation’ - the difference between a consciousness associated with a body that has not yet lost the potential to live and the consciousness of a body that has forever lost that potential – can never be resolved.

To clarify: since it is impossible to ‘come back from the dead’, whatever the clinical definition of ‘death’ may be, we can never say for sure, based on those aspects of an NDE involving veridical evidence of the earth-bound variety (exemplified by Maria’s shoe), that consciousness survives permanent bodily death. The best we can say is it does temporarily, since, for a while, it operates outside the body, as in an OBE.

Which, potentially, takes us into a very thorny corner of our research envelope – because, technically, the only data under the court-of-law, beyond-reasonable-doubt principle that would be evidence of the ‘trans-material testimony’ kind – would be from someone who has permanently crossed into that other realm. Which by any yardstick is impossible, since this evidence has no means materially of being conveyed.

From Professor Tucker’s research, we learn that past-life subjects who reported ‘interval memories’ tended to make a greater number of statements about the previous life that were verified to be accurate, recalled more names from that former life, had higher scores on the strength-of-case scale, and were more likely to state the names of the previous personalities and to give accurate details about their deaths compared to those who hadn’t reported such memories⁵⁴. There is something about this testimony, perhaps then, that may be considered to be inherently reliable.

Close analysis of 35 ‘interval memories’ in Burma indicated that these memories could be broken down into three parts: a ‘transitional stage’; a ‘stable stage’ in a particular location; and a ‘return stage’ involving a choice of parents or conception.

The reports of the Burmese children’s interval memories were compared to the testimony of people who had had NDEs – and were found to contain features that were similar to the transcendental (or trans-material) component of Western NDEs as well as having significant areas of overlap with Asian NDEs. ‘It thus appeared,’ Professor Tucker concluded, ‘that interval memories and NDEs could be considered part of the same overall phenomenon, reports of an afterlife (my emphasis added).’⁵⁵

The interval memories cast doubt, too, Professor Tucker went on to say, on the materialist reductionist explanation of NDEs as mere fantasies produced by dying brains, since the subjects reporting the interval memories were young and healthy.

53 Raised in a section of Prof. Tucker’s paper – Children Who Claim to Remember Previous Lives: Past, Present and Future Research, Division of Perceptual Studies, Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, University of Virginia - that discusses work beyond individual cases to include examinations of groups of cases, with correlations from across the department’s database.
54 Op.cit.
55 Op.cit.

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.