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In the following dialogue, excerpted and edited from the Institute of Noetic Sciences' teleseminar series "Essentials of Noetic Science," IONS Senior Scientist Dean Radin talks with Jim Tucker, associate professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia who also works in the Department of Perceptual Studies, started by Ian Stevenson in 1967. Stevenson was a psychiatrist best known for his studies on reincarnation with children; Tucker has been continuing the work that Stevenson began. His most recent book is Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives. In it he challenges the notion that consciousness is only the result of a functioning brain and suggests that consciousness can be considered separately from the brain, which provides a basis for claims of reincarnation.

 

 

 

 

You mentioned that Ian started the vision in 1967, but he actually started this work in 1961, when he took his first trip to study these cases. Ian was a psychiatrist with a successful academic career; he was chairman of the Department of Psychiatry here at the University of Virginia while still in his late thirties. But Ian had always had an interest in parapsychology and the question about survival after death. Over the years, he collected forty-four cases of people reporting memories of previous lives, from various sources, such as newspapers, magazines, and journals. When he pulled them all together, he found many similarities, including the fact that many of them were young children reporting these memories. Ian wondered if current cases of such children could still be found and wrote about all of this in an article.

Soon after, Ian heard about some cases in India and took his first trip there in 1961. He heard about five cases, but once he got to India, he found twenty-five cases. Ian discovered that memories of past lives were much more common than anyone had ever known before. He became more and more interested and eventually stepped down as chairman of the Department of Psychiatry to form the Department of Perceptual Studies and to work on these cases full time. Ian did this for several decades and published numerous academic books and articles about it.

When I trained here at the University of Virginia in psychiatry in the late '80s and early '90s, I heard about Ian's work, but at the time I wasn't intrigued by it. After my training, I went into private practice and remarried. My wife was very intrigued by reincarnation, psychics, and things that I had never really given much thought to, and because of her interest, I began doing a lot of reading. I happened to be reading one of Ian's books when I learned that his division had received a new grant to study the effects of near-death experiences on the lives of those who had them. Looking for sort of a hobby in addition to my practice, I called him up, and for a couple of years, I helped with interviewing patients. Eventually, Ian asked me if I would be interested in taking a trip to Asia with one of our colleagues to study some of these cases. I was very interested, and after that, I joined the department half time and in 2000 came on full time. I've been doing it ever since.