Home > ~ Buddhism: Wisdom Bliss ~

Discussion on Ian Stevenson Reincarnation Studies

bohiruci
6 Jan 09, 05:41

The Scientific Evidence for the Existence of Reincarnation

A list of academic literature by the late Professor Stevenson, a former Head of a major university's Department of Psychiatry.

QUOTE

http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/inter...m#Reincarnation

REINCARNATION

1. Shroder, Tom. Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999. In 1997 Dr. Stevenson agreed to let Tom Shroder, an editor at the Washington Post, travel with him through India, Lebanon and the United States as he investigated cases of children who seemed to remember previous lives. This is Shroder's book about those experiences. Now out in paperback as Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives from Fireside Books.

2. Stevenson, Ian. Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation, revised ed., 2001. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company (originally published by University Press of Virginia, 1987). Dr. Stevenson describes, for the general reader, research conducted over the past forty years. He also addresses some of the questions frequently asked about these cases.

3. Stevenson, Ian. Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1974 (originally published as Vol. 26, Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, 1966). Detailed reports of twenty cases of children (from five different countries) who claimed to remember previous lives.

4. Stevenson, Ian. Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. A 200 page synopsis of Dr. Stevenson's 2 volume, 2000+ page Reincarnation and Biology.

Profile of Professor Stevenson:

QUOTE

http://reluctant-messenger.com/reincarnation-proof.htm#about

Probably the best known, if not most respected, collection of scientific data that appears to provide scientific proof that reincarnation is real, is the life's work of Dr. Ian Stevenson. Instead of relying on hypnosis to verify that an individual has had a previous life, he instead chose to collect thousands of cases of children who spontaneously (without hypnosis) remember a past life. Dr. Ian Stevenson uses this approach because spontaneous past life memories in a child can be investigated using strict scientific protocols. Hypnosis, while useful in researching into past lives, is less reliable from a purely scientific perspective. In order to collect his data, Dr. Stevenson methodically documents the child's statements of a previous life. Then he identifies the deceased person the child remembers being, and verifies the facts of the deceased person's life that match the child's memory. He even matches birthmarks and birth defects to wounds and scars on the deceased, verified by medical records. His strict methods systematically rule out all possible "normal" explanations for the child’s memories.

Dr. Stevenson has devoted the last forty years to the scientific documentation of past life memories of children from all over the world. He has over 3000 cases in his files. Many people, including skeptics and scholars, agree that these cases offer the best evidence yet for reincarnation.

Dr. Stevenson's credentials are impeccable. He is a medical doctor and had many scholarly papers to his credit before he began paranormal research. He is the former head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and now is Director of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia.

In order to help the reader become familiar with Dr. Stevenson's work, a 1988 Omni Magazine Interview is reprinted below. Following the interview is a summary of one of Dr. Stevenson's most famous cases.

He was also a bright student who graduated at the top of his class:

QUOTE

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1001393_pf.html

Ian Stevenson; Sought To Document Memories Of Past Lives in Children

By Tom Shroder
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 11, 2007; C06

Dr. Ian Stevenson, 88, who spent nearly half a century traveling the world to meticulously investigate hundreds of cases of small children who appeared to recall previous lives, died of pneumonia Feb. 8 at the Westminster-Canterbury of the Blue Ridge retirement community in Charlottesville.

To Dr. Stevenson and his many admirers, his detailed case studies provided more than ample room for, as he liked to put it, "a rational person, if he wants, to believe in reincarnation on the basis of evidence."

In 1977, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease devoted most of one issue to Dr. Stevenson's work. In a commentary for the issue, psychiatrist Harold Lief described Dr. Stevenson as "a methodical, careful, even cautious, investigator, whose personality is on the obsessive side." He also wrote: "Either he is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known . . . as 'the Galileo of the 20th century.' "

But with rare exception, mainstream scientists -- the only group Dr. Stevenson really cared to persuade -- tended to ignore or dismiss his decades in the field and his many publications. Of those who noticed him at all, some questioned Dr. Stevenson's objectivity; others claimed he was credulous. Still others suggested that he was insufficiently versed in the cultures and languages of his subjects to do credible investigations. Dr Stevenson responded that his critics should come investigate the cases for themselves. That did not happen.

But Dr. Stevenson himself recognized one glaring flaw in his case for reincarnation: the absence of any evidence of a physical process by which a personality could survive death and transfer to another body.

The evidence he did provide in abundance came not from past-life readings or hypnotic regressions but from using the techniques of a detective or investigative reporter to evaluate claims that a young child, often just beginning to talk, had spontaneously started to speak of the details of another life. In a fairly typical case, a boy in Beirut spoke of being a 25-year-old mechanic, thrown to his death from a speeding car on a beach road. According to multiple witnesses, the boy provided the name of the driver, the exact location of the crash, the names of the mechanic's sisters and parents and cousins, and the people he hunted with -- all of which turned out to match the life of a man who had died several years before the boy was born, and who had no apparent connection to the boy's family.

In interviewing witnesses and reviewing documents, Dr. Stevenson searched for alternate ways to account for the testimony: that the child came upon the information in some normal way, that the witnesses were engaged in fraud or self-delusion, that the correlations were the result of coincidence or misunderstanding. But in scores of cases, Dr. Stevenson concluded that no normal explanation sufficed.

Tall and lanky, patrician in appearance and diction, Dr. Stevenson was a tireless researcher who often would forget to stop for food during all-day treks on dusty third-world trails, running younger colleagues into the ground by nightfall. He catalogued more than 2,500 remarkably similar cases, mostly in Asia and the Middle East but also in Europe, Africa and North and South America. His first book on the topic, "Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation," was published in 1966; his last, "European Cases of the Reincarnation Type," in 2003.

Dr. Stevenson, a native of Montreal, earned his medical degree from McGill University in Montreal in 1943, graduating at the top of his class. In 1957, at 39, he became head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. But from his mother, a devotee of theosophy, which Dr. Stevenson described as a "kind of potted Buddhism for Westerners," he had inherited a keen interest in the paranormal, which became a calling after a trip to India in 1961 convinced him that the child cases were both ubiquitous and impressive.

As his research earned the scorn of some colleagues and caused unease in the university administration, Dr. Stevenson gave up his administrative duties to head what he cagily named the Division of Personality Studies, now the Division of Perceptual Studies, funded by a grant from Chester Carlson, the man who invented the Xerox process.

Dr. Stevenson retired from active research in 2002, leaving his work to successors led by Dr. Bruce Greyson. Dr. Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist, has carried on Dr. Stevenson's work with children, focusing on North American cases.

Tucker said that toward the end of his life, Dr. Stevenson had accepted that his long-stated goal of getting science "to seriously consider reincarnation as a possibility" was not going to be realized in this lifetime.

But in 1996, no less a luminary than astronomer Carl Sagan, a founding member of a group that set out to debunk unscientific claims, wrote in his book, "The Demon-Haunted World": "There are three claims in the [parapsychology] field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study," the third of which was "that young children sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation."

His first wife, Octavia Stevenson, died in 1984.

Survivors include his wife of 21 years, Margaret Pertzoff of Charlottesville; a brother; and a sister.

Shroder, editor of the Post's Sunday magazine, wrote a book about Dr. Stevenson, "Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives" (1999).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_T5vNgusEw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooRnQT4agXY
bohiruci
6 Jan 09, 05:45

In 1977, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease devoted most of one issue to Dr. Stevenson's work. In a commentary for the issue, psychiatrist Harold Lief described Dr. Stevenson as "a methodical, careful, even cautious, investigator, whose personality is on the obsessive side." He also wrote: "Either he is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known . . . as 'the Galileo of the 20th century.' "

But with rare exception, mainstream scientists -- the only group Dr. Stevenson really cared to persuade -- tended to ignore or dismiss his decades in the field and his many publications. Of those who noticed him at all, some questioned Dr. Stevenson's objectivity; others claimed he was credulous. Still others suggested that he was insufficiently versed in the cultures and languages of his subjects to do credible investigations. Dr Stevenson responded that his critics should come investigate the cases for themselves. That did not happen.

And

Dr. Stevenson's credentials are impeccable. He is a medical doctor and had many scholarly papers to his credit before he began paranormal research. He is the former head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and now is Director of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia.
bohiruci
6 Jan 09, 05:50

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/dp5/stevenson.htm

Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect
by Ian Stevenson. Praeger Publishers, 1997; xviii + 203 pages, ISBN 0-275-95189-8, paperback, $17.95.

David Pratt

The world's leading scientific investigator of evidence for reincarnation is Dr Ian Stevenson, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia. For over 30 years he and his colleagues have been studying cases involving children who remember past lives. Most of the cases come from the Hindu and Buddhist countries of South Asia, the Shiite peoples of Lebanon and Turkey, the tribes of West Africa, and the tribes of northwestern North America. In 1997 Stevenson published details of 225 cases in a massive work Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. The same year he presented a summary of 112 cases in a much shorter book Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.

Stevenson has discovered that birthmarks and birth defects are often related to injuries sustained in the previous life, especially injuries associated with violent death. In many cases he has been able to obtain postmortem reports, hospital records, or other documents that confirm the location of the wounds on the deceased person in question. Birthmarks often correspond to bullet wounds or stab wounds; sometimes there are two marks corresponding to the points where a bullet entered and left the body. Birthmarks may also be related to a variety of other wounds or marks, not necessarily connected with the previous personality's death, including surgical incisions and blood left on the body when it was cremated. A boy who lost his fingers in an accident with a fodder-chopping machine and died of an unrelated illness the following year was reborn without the fingers of his right hand. A woman who had been run over by a train, which sliced her right leg in two, was reborn with her right leg absent from just below the knee. A man who, while resting in a field, had been mistaken in the twilight for a rabbit and shot in the ear, was reborn with a severely malformed ear.

Stevenson has found that most of the details that children remember about their previous life turn out to be accurate (he deals only with spontaneous memories and makes no use of hypnosis). Further evidence for reincarnation comes from 'behavioural memories'. Children sometimes display behaviour that is unusual for the child's family but fits in with what is known about the person whose life the child remembers. For example, there are cases where children of lower caste Indian families who believe they had been Brahmins -- and in their view still were -- would refuse to eat their family's food, which they considered polluted. Conversely, a child remembering the life of a street-sweeper may show an alarming lack of concern about cleanliness. Some children show skills that they have not learned in their present life, but which the previous personality was known to have had.

Many of the children express memories of the previous life in their play. A girl who remembered a previous life as a schoolteacher would assemble her playmates as pupils and play at instructing them with an imaginary blackboard. A child who remembered the life of a garage mechanic would spend hours under a family sofa 'repairing' the car that it represented for him. One child who remembered a life in which he had committed suicide by hanging himself had the habit of walking around with a piece of rope tied round his neck.

Phobias occur in about a third of the cases and are nearly always related to the mode of death in the previous life. For example, death by drowning may lead to fear of being immersed in water; death from a snake bite may lead to a phobia of snakes; a child who remembers a life that ended in shooting may show a phobia of guns and loud noises; and a person who died in a road accident may have a phobia of cars, buses, or trucks. Philias (the opposite of phobias) are also common. They frequently take the form of a desire or demand for particular foods not eaten in the child's present family, or for clothes different from those ordinarily worn by the family members. Other examples involve cravings for addictive substances, such as tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs that the previous personality was known to have used.

In some cases a child remembers a previous life as a person of the opposite sex. Stevenson comments: 'Such children almost invariably show traits of the sex of the claimed previous life. They cross-dress, play the games of the opposite sex, and may otherwise show attitudes characteristic of that sex. As with the phobias, the attachment to the sex and habits of the previous life usually becomes attenuated as the child grows older; but a few of these children remain intransigently fixed to the sex of the previous life, and one has become homosexual.