The Scientist Who Tried to Prove Reincarnation
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 May 2026
⏱️ 99 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | responsive Xeneglossi speaking in a foreign language placed under hypnosis basically and you know |
| 0:05.4 | go into this trance and they would not only speak this language that allegedly they had no knowledge of |
| 0:11.7 | so you know this housewife in ohio starts speaking german but she's never taken a you know she's not |
| 0:17.6 | 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 |
| 0:24.8 | of sentences and, you know, sprinkle them into a conversation. She was actually responding to |
| 0:29.8 | questions that were asked in German, and he thought that that was important as a paranormal case, |
| 0:35.0 | because you can't really explain dialogue because that requires |
| 0:38.1 | lived experience in his mind. My argument in the suicide book is basically that people most |
| 0:43.3 | frequently died by suicide for social reasons, because of negative social appraisal, shame, anxiety, |
| 0:50.5 | guilt, feeling the weight of other minds on you in judgment. She had a dream where her daughter was |
| 0:56.3 | floating up away from her, reaching down, saying goodbye, I'm free, or something like that. And she woke |
| 1:03.7 | up thinking, that's a really weird dream. Why am I having this dream about Victoria? And it's not |
| 1:07.7 | something that she would normally say. And she literally went to her bedroom right after she woke up and found the girl was not in her bed. |
| 1:14.0 | And then half an hour later, somebody knocked on the door saying a taxi driver had found her body on the street, having jumped. |
| 1:24.1 | All right, everybody, it's Michael Shermer. |
| 1:26.5 | It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer show brought to you as usual by the skeptic society and skeptic magazine. Hey, here's the latest issue on UFOs and UAPs and aliens. Guess what it is? It's another religion. Yes, it is. We're never going to find evidence for UAPs that aliens have come to Earth. Well, we might. Okay, all right. It could happen, but I don't put a lot of Cretans in it yet. Show me the body, and I will believe, all right? But I really think it's more like God that, you know, it's either you believe or you don't, and there's no evidence or proof or arguments that are going to convince everybody. Anyway, but read it yourself and check it out. |
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